How much "perfection" in stop scaling is a good thing? How much is too much?

[jbird604]

This afternoon I got to playing around with one of the organs at the shop (a fairly new one, built 2004, Rodgers) and took note of just how "imperfect" (by design, no doubt) the scaling is on many if not most of the stops. For example, the great 8' principal stop has at least five very distinctly different tone colors across the 61-note scale. What we'd call "sample breaks" I suppose. Clearly, this note and that note just above it are not just differently tuned versions of the same tone color or harmonic structure. I noted (and tried fixing with the voicing adjustments, to no avail) that right in the middle of the keyboard there is a plain and obvious change in tone/harmonic structure, such that middle G is breathy and almost raspy, full of stringiness, but middle A is almost a stopped flute tone. No amount of "brightening" the tone of that middle A brings it anywhere near the crispness of the G, and you have to make the G exceedingly dull to make it match the A in lack of breathiness.

Not that this makes for a bad stop though. Indeed, it probably is fairly typical of the pipe organs that they sample for these modern-day digitals. I noticed this same phenomenon, but to a far lesser extent, when I was voicing my Allen Renaissance a couple years ago after it came into the shop. On the Allen, the great 8' principal has four or five discrete samples which are "stretched" over the 61 notes, and each one is clearly different from the others, though the differences are subtle and can be almost completely disguised by applying the necessary filters and note-to-note leveling and tone mod.

I hear other organs with some degree of this variability in color all the time, but it rarely sticks out the way it does on this 2004 Rodgers "Allegiant" model.

Back in the 70's when Allen was touting their unique MOS technology, the very first digital organ, one of the salient points of the MOS system was the "perfect" note to note scaling. It was easily demonstrated. Playing a chromatic scale all the way from the bottom to the top on any stop of any MOS organ, you would never hear a "break" of any kind. Each note was precisely identical in tone color, level, and harmonic structure to the notes around it, just changed in frequency. This was the nature of MOS -- the same harmonic recipe was used to construct every single note of a given rank. This was the "perfection" in scaling that pipe organ builders sought after but didn't always achieve! Or was it ...

Subsequent technologies have tended to go backwards on this point, producing more and more variation from note to note. Some systems, such as Hauptwerk, have a distinct sample for every single note of every rank, and thus pride themselves in having no two notes that are identical (except for the occasional notes that are derived by stretching from a neighbor, when the pipe sample was flawed).

To be honest, I've not been terribly bothered by the audible sample breaks in my Renaissance organ, and I didn't even find the very obvious variations in the Rodgers to be musically unsettling, though I can see that there might be a time or a piece of music in which this imperfect scaling would draw attention to itself in an unattractive way. But of course real orchestral instruments, such as clarinets and oboes, violins, etc., exhibit clearly uneven harmonic structure from note to note, and that is part of the "charm" of the real instruments.

Other intentional imperfections are often present in today's digital organs as well -- rather striking offsets in tuning between stops and divisions, chiff that comes and goes, wind sag that makes notes go flat when large chords are played. One feature of many Rodgers digitals that I normally turn "off" when voicing one is called "Random Tuning" -- an effect that creates random SOUR notes, especially on reed stops, that move around, supposedly giving you the same sense of erratic tuning you'd get when playing a real pipe organ. I'm not 100% sold on all this mimicking of the pipe organ.

Anybody else have thoughts on this?

[myorgan]

I do believe some difference in sampling is necessary for a good sound, but one has to carefully consider if the variation is truly "good" organ sound worthy of preserving, or something which should be corrected. One of the "flaws" I've noticed in Allen's Trompette 8' on the Swell, as well as on the tone card, is when one is approximately 1 octave below middle C. The sound (to me) sounds like the reed being sampled had a loose reed or shallot. It has always bothered me if I'm playing music of a slower tempo, but is hardly noticeable in music with a quicker tempo.

"Sag" and other "features" of various organs have never intrigued me. Adjustable Chiff is more of interest to me than some other features. However, Celeste Tuning (when appropriately separated in pitch) can be truly luscious!

Bottom line, one needs to consider the effect of each "feature" they choose to implement, including unintended consequences (i.e. wolfs, etc.).

Michael

[jbird604]

Well said, Michael. Yes, a bit of variability makes the digital organ sound more "real" or less artificial or something. But it seems wrong to preserve the truly bad aspects of a sampled organ just to be "authentic." It's ok for Hauptwerk to preserve some historic organ as is, but who wants to play an organ with obvious quirks and ugly sounds week after week for a church service?

This sums up my beef with what the builders are doing today. With Allen, a MOS or MOS2 organ was always beautifully scaled just because there was only one sample over the whole range. As you note, certain of their stops (trompette in particular) may have suffered a bit due to the single sample, which started to fall apart in the bottom octave. Continuing into ADC and MDS, Allen maintained that "perfect" scaling, though dipping a toe into the waters on multi-sampling with certain stops that had, apparently, different samples in different regions, though still very well matched and hardly distinguishable.

But the raw sound of some of the new ones is quite shocking, and begs for a skilled voicer to sort it all out! I don't get to hear brand new organs out of the box very often, and on the rare occasion that I get to be present when a new one is turned on for the first time, I'm often thinking about lots of other stuff besides listening to the note by note scaling. However, if the Allen Renaissance (R-230) I've spent so much time with the past two years, and the Rodgers Allegiant that I just brought into the shop are any indication, the builders are expecting a LOT of work to be done by the installer/voicer to whip these rough scales into musical condition!

This fits in with my general discontent with the way organs are marketed these days (which is not too different from what we've been doing for half a century). The company builds an organ with a lot of potential, ships it to the dealer who SHOULD know how to correctly set it up, and then we all hope for the best. But all too often the organ never reaches its potential due to all the ways the ball can be dropped -- (1) model poorly chosen for the room or needs of the church; (2) not enough audio provided; (3) poor placement of the speakers; (4) lousy acoustics in the room; (5) not enough attention to the voicing, or even downright incompetence in the simplest things, such as channel balancing; (5) lousy registrations and horrible playing.

It's obvious why the old Hammond tone wheel organ proved so successful -- it's almost impossible to set it up wrong! No voicing, no worries about channel balance (there is only one). As long as the speaker is set where the organist can hear it, there isn't much you can mess up. But our modern digitals are very fussy, and all too often just don't work very well. Adding this new layer of complexity, with all the correction of scaling that needs to be done, seems a bad idea to me.

[Admin]

I suppose if "perfect scaling" means no discernable breaks, then using a single sample for the entire compass qualifies, but acoustical instruments, including pipe organs, do not have the same harmonic content over their range. A clarinet, for example, has a distinctly different timbre in its lowest register than its upper. Far from being an advantage, the invariant harmonic makeup of a stop across the compass, was in my opinion, one of the least satisfying aspect of the MOS and ADC models. Each stop had a range of notes, usually in the center of the keyboard, where they sounded realistic (probably in the range the sample was recorded), but not so good outside that range. Above that range there was a tendency for the sound to become thin, and below that range, an unnatural tubbiness.

Back then memory was expensive (I remember purchasing an 8K, -yes 8000 bytes- RAM board for my home-built computer for $800 back in 1975), so having an individual sample for each note was not economically feasible. But for the past twenty years or so, its inexecusable not to.

Random tuning, wind models, action sounds, and the like are cost conscious attempts to make the perfection of digital sampling less sterile. Whether or not emulating the imperfections of the originals is an improvement is debatable. In the Hammond clone world, the ability to imitate the flaws in tonewheel models, such as crosstalk and keyclick, flaws that Hammond attempted to minimize over the years, is seen as a plus.

[Jay999]

I'd like to hear an Allen dealer, or his technician chime in here. The descriptions of unfinished tonal matters in these new organs, fresh out of the factory, sounds a lot like a new pipe organ being installed in a church. It could be that a lot of tonal finishing of a digital instrument (in the factory) has to be undone when it is installed in it's new acoustical setting. Is there a "tonal finishing team" available from the Allen factory on a new organ purchase? Or perhaps, a detailed list of instructions sent with the organ, for the local dealer's technician to work through, when installing a new instrument?

New pipe organs are generally sent out with dependable and predictable speech character already voiced into the pipes, but left unfinished enough to compensate for the acoustics of the room. Sometimes, even this amount of pre-voicing has to be undone, when the room requires more power, more brilliance, or, on the other hand, a lesser amount of the two. And then there is the finessing of individual pipes, so they sound correct and balanced throughout the scale.

Since digital organs have so much capability of being "married to the room" these days, I wonder if builders like Allen and Rodgers are leaving these voicing nuances to be carried out, once the organ has been installed in its new environment.

[Admin]

Is there a "tonal finishing team" available from the Allen factory on a new organ purchase? Or perhaps, a detailed list of instructions sent with the organ, for the local dealer's technician to work through, when installing a new instrument?

The service of Art is often at odds with practicality of business. The cost of voicing an organ has to be assumed by one or more parties. That cost has risen with the advancement of technology. Digital organs have more ranks than in the past, and now they have multiple sample sets and more controls to adjust, making proper voicing a more time consuming and expensive proposition.

If you're in a competitive business in a down market, how do you deal with the cost? The problem is exacerbated by the fact the benefit of voicing is not quantifiable from the customers standpoint.

[Jay999]

Admin: Well said.

[voet]

The service of Art is often at odds with practicality of business. The cost of voicing an organ has to be assumed by one or more parties. That cost has risen with the advancement of technology. Digital organs have more ranks than in the past, and now they have multiple sample sets and more controls to adjust, making proper voicing a more time consuming and expensive proposition.

If you're in a competitive business in a down market, how do you deal with the cost? The problem is exacerbated by the fact the benefit of voicing is not quantifiable from the customers standpoint.

When a pipe organ is installed, the builder spends a great deal of time voicing it for the room. I once had the privilege of assisting George Bozeman with the final voicing of a historic organ that he had restored. This process took about a month for a 20 rank instrument. Not only was each pipe voiced in turn, after the rank was finished, we would each spend time playing different pieces using that rank, while the other person moved through the nave listening. As successive ranks were completed we would do this using different stop combinations. Sometimes something becomes evident while one is playing organ literature that is not apparent while playing a chromatic scale. We would also take breaks to allow our ears to recover before resuming this process.

It seems to me that if it has become too time consuming and expensive for digital manufacturers to do final voicing, perhaps they should make it easier for the organist to do it. One of the features of Hauptwerk that I really appreciate is the ability to make adjustments on individual notes. I do this as I am playing pieces. "That note sticks out," or "That note needs to be a tad louder." As I am playing, I stop, identify the offending note in the offending rank, and adjust it on the spot.

[myorgan]

Bill,

Your post brings up an interesting question-should people or organizations receiving a new organ expect the package completed upon delivery, or should they expect to become technically proficient so the basic organ can be finished by themselves to their expectations?

Bottom line-are organists supposed to be technicians as well, or should they expect technicians to accede to their requests? If so, at what point do the requests become unreasonable?

This Forum is populated by many who are organists alone, many who are both organists and technically proficient (to some extent), and many who are technicians but dabble as an organist. For us to expect "one size fits all" would be a mistake (IMHO).

Michael

[jbird604]

Yes, Michael, your question points up exactly why IMHO we have gone TOO FAR in making digital organs "voiceable." Since no dealer can truly afford to pay for the time it would take to do everything that can possibly be done to a modern organ, and since end users are typically not qualified to do it, and since most churches do NOT want the organist tinkering with the inner workings of a $100,000 organ unless he/she is a fully qualified tech and golden-eared voicer -- it is obvious that all this capability is both unnecessary and in fact DANGEROUS from a musical standpoint.

Since we can't really put this cat back in the bag, I'd suggest that organ builders ought to ship their organs fully ready to play in a TYPICAL installation, with dealers expected to know how to make MINOR changes, such as tweaking the bass and treble controls on individual audio channels, which may be needed to make the organ sound good in a particular environment.

For example, we all know that an organ voiced well for a nice lively church will sound unacceptably harsh and screechy when installed in a church that has very little natural reverb or sustain. So the dealer MUST know how to taper the treble of each channel to make such an organ work in that type of space.

But what we do NOT need is to have to fire up DOVE (or use the built-in programs in other organs) to re-work the actual note to note levels of every single rank (all 150 or more of them). That simply won't get done, or it won't get done right, and the organ will never meet its potential.

So, we can't go back to building MOS organs or any other type with just a fixed scaling and stop balance, everything mixed down to one or two channels. But we can build modern organs with professionally scaled stops that won't require the installer to go note by note through each stop just cleaning up the mess, finding all the sour and raspy and out of scale notes and fixing them manually.

[jbird604]

The sad thing is that just at this point in history when it has finally become TECHNICALLY possible to simulate the sound of a pipe organ, and regulate the sound of every single note of every single rank in even an inexpensive organ, this has become pretty much irrelevant to a great many people, in and out of church. And while all this capability exists, the execution of such a voicing marathon would be so time-consuming and so expensive that it is probably almost never done on any organ except as a true labor of love.

Food for thought -- a MODEST 2-manual organ today with 30 stops on the knobs, has four alternative ranks for each named stop, thus 150 actual stops in memory. Each manual stop has 61 notes and each pedal stop 32. Thus a total of about 7,000 -- yes, I said SEVEN THOUSAND -- individual notes that can be adjusted individually for pitch, level, and tone color. If a voicer spends just one minute on each note doing all that, it would take about 120 HOURS of work. And that's for MODEST organ. A big one with 2 or 3 times that many stops would take MONTHS of voicing by a diligent voicer.

Thus, NOBODY every actually voices a new organ note by note, no matter how capable the instrument or the voicer. It just doesn't happen.

So we've created a monster than no one can tame. In the old MOS days, there was no voicing of any kind beyond simply setting the volume knobs on the amps, more or less all of them to the same number on the dial or just to the red marks the factory had put on the shafts. Then adjusting the bass boost on the DAC board(s) (or on later models, both bass and treble), to obtain a pleasing balance without too much bass or too much treble. No worries about stop to stop levels, and certainly no note to note leveling.

The ADC and MDS models went further, giving us latitude to tinker with bass/treble/mid/gain on a number of separate stop groups, some organ models having as few as just two groups of stops, others having a dozen or more. But still no true stop by stop leveling, as you had to adhere to certain well-understood rules about the relationships among the stops. And no note to note leveling either, except for the "region" controls on TT-4 voice cards, which were rare.

Back in those days, it was POSSIBLE to mess up an organ by getting even these rudimentary controls out of whack, but if you messed up, it only took a few minutes to make things right. Nowadays, a copy of DOVE in the wrong hands can totally ruin an organ in the blink of an eye, and it can take a skilled voicer days or weeks or MONTHS to go back through and fix what someone may have messed up in a fit of ignorance.

So modern organ technology is a double-edge sword. Yes, we can get extraordinarily realistic sound and mimic all kinds of quirks and flaws and idiosyncrasies of a pipe organ, but only IF at least a moderate amount of time is spent in the voicing. Thankfully, MOST of the time a typical digital sounds pretty good right out of the crate, and when a buyer really wants a professional and artistic voicing they can usually get it done, either by a factory expert or by a diligent dealer or tech.

As well as I understand the process of voicing, to be perfectly honest, the time and patience required to do a good job is daunting even to me. When I think about the amount of time I COULD spend on the next digital I bring home, before I'll even truly enjoy playing it, I'd almost rather just have a good old MOS, or at least a reasonable-size ADC or MDS, so I can make some quick adjustments and get to playing it!

[voet]

Myorgan and Jbird, you both make excellent points about voicing an instrument. I realize that there is no ideal way to address the challenges of every situation.

My experience is primarily with pipe organs. I always kept a notebook by the organ to write down the things for the technician to address on the next visit. At one church with a nice three manual instrument, I was unhappy with the Great mixture because a note in the midrange screeched. The technician that the church had been using wanted to replace the mixture! This was a red flag, so I called in another technician who found one pipe that needed to be tweaked. After he adjusted it, the mixture fit in beautifully. Needless to say, he became the technician.

Care of an organ needs to be a partnership between the person who plays it regularly and the professional who maintains it. I would never attempt to re-voice an organ pipe on my own, but I regularly tuned an errant pipe or reinstalled a leather nut that had come off of a tracker. I only tune a reed on the wire, not the scroll—I leave that to the professional. It is important to know what you can handle and what you should leave alone.

In the case of a digital organ, I believe the older paradigm is no longer feasible. I have a 3-manual Content as my home organ. When I got it, a few lights needed to be replaced—one for a Syndyne lighted draw-knob, and one each for the music desk and pedal. Replacement bulbs from Content were very expensive and shipping was exorbitant. Fortunately, people on this forum advised me and I found suitable replacements at reasonable cost.

I later decided to use my Content as the console for Hauptwerk. Because the Content used one of the MIDI ports for additional voices, I wanted to have a technician reverse this so it could be used with Hauptwerk. I live in a metropolitan area with a population in excess of 1 Million people, but not one electronic organ tech. (There are still three techs for pipe organs.) I found someone about 60 miles away. He is past retirement age, but is still working. Naturally I had to pay for 4 hours of travel time plus the hours that he worked on my instrument. It may be worth spending several hundred dollars every now and then to keep the organ going, but if he retires, the next closest tech is three hours away, if they would even be willing to come to my home. The alternative would be to ship the organ to them!

The original Content and each of the 5 Hauptwerk organs all needed refinements. I don't mean changing a principal into a string, but evening out volume variations within a stop. I make adjustments as I am playing. A couple of recent examples may be helpful.

I am currently learning a Bach fugue. I use a plenum registration on the Rugwerk of the Laurenskerk organ in Rotterdam. A couple of notes stuck out, so I played the offending note with each stop until I found the culprit. In some cases this occurred as a result of two ranks being played together. Playing them separately did not seem bad, but when played together certain harmonics were reinforced that caused unpleasant prominence.

On another piece I used the reeds of the Chamadewerk and noticed that the volume seemed to taper off at the high end. This was not so obvious when the reeds were played alone, but became noticeable when accompanied on another manual.

Marcussen probably has the organ beautifully voiced in the Laurenskerk. I don't know if my perceptions are due to the Hauptwerk recording, the effects of my speaker system, my room, or even my hearing. It really does not matter. What does matter to me is that with Hauptwerk, I can make these adjustments. If someone gets my Hauptwerk organ after me and thinks I messed it up, the original settings can be easily restored.

Admin's comment “The service of Art is often at odds with practicality of business,” is also true for pipe organ builders. One of the things that drives up the cost of a pipe organ is the time the builder spends voicing it in its final home. I know of several unsatisfactory organ installations by low cost pipe organ builders that were transformed by re-voicing. Maybe not every organist wants to or should be able to make adjustments to the organ they play, but I would not want to be denied the opportunity.

[Dutchy]

Beautiful theme, beautiful considerations, thanks!

My personal experiences:

With the Viscount Physis technology, much voicing is possible

• for a register: wide/narrow 'mensuur' (mellow or bright sound), vividness of tone ('fluctuation'), different attack and release time, air noise;
• for the entire organ: a 5 band equalizer, a number of different reverb programs (I.e. Chapel, Gothic church., Cathedral), key response time;
• for every single note (key): volume and (de)tuning;
• beside this there are 10 to 30 alternative voices per register;
• and several other features, I'm not complete here.

In short, more than enough options to make a complete mess of the organ. However, in addition to the 4 custom intonations/voicings, there are always 4 non-editable standard intonations, so one can always go back to the initial situation. And if the custom-intonation is done by a professional and stored in the internal memory or on USB, it can always be reloaded, even though an unskillfull person has messed up it completely.

Finally, I do something similar as voet: when something strikes me while playing, I look for the reason and I (try to) correct it. In addition, I often play one piece several times in succession, but always with a different alternative register, eg first the Praestant 8, then a Diapason 8, a Montre 8 etc. Or, only with, say, the Gedäckt 8, but with several different intonations on this voice. The experiences of voet closely recalls my own experiences, although I don't use Hauptwerk.

This way I'gradually (playfully) discover the possibilities of my organ.

Granted to John, not everyone wants to do this. In fact, maybe, only a few enthousiasts (like voet, an me, and maybe some others). But it doesn't have to lead to mess, as I mentioned above, in a Physis based organ. Nor in a Johannus or a Content. I hardle can believe that a modern Allen has no reset function or a possibility to store en recall voicings, or something like that. By the way, I fully agree with John that a professional voicer cannot possible voice a digital orgen for 120 hours, due to the costs. And that a digital organ must be properly 'prevoiced'.

In sum, as individual customer I like the voicing possibilities of the modern organs very much.

So far my thoughts on this particularly interesting topic. Thanks again for discussing this.

D.

[jbird604]

I will have to take the same approach as Dutchy and voet -- I'll address issues as they arise, once this Rodgers 677 is in my living room. The brief time I've spent playing it in the shop, it's been apparent that the scaling is pretty rough -- at least that's my impression, with a note here and there that is obviously too loud, a note here and there that is the "wrong" tone color. And I'm sure the balance from stop to stop isn't precisely what I'll prefer.

My initial setup will be only whatever it takes to assign the stops to the four output channels to my liking. It's nice that this model allows you to assign any stop to any channel regardless of division. Thus the speakers won't be great over here and swell over there. I think I'll do an interesting spread. Expression pedals will continue to control the stops according to their division, regardless of which speaker they go to.

So I'll keep a notebook by the organ and write it down when I hear something that needs adjusting. Probably won't do a 30-hour voicing marathon before I even start using it for practice, even though I can imagine that it would take that long to go through each of the claimed "44 pipe ranks" -- there are 27 speaking stops, some of which are celestes or mixtures, and some of which have second voices or "Voice Palette" stops. That likely yields around 2400 individual notes that can be adjusted for volume, tuning, and tone, on top of the 44 ranks, each of which is adjustable for overall level, tuning, and tone. And then there are the 24 orchestral patches, also voiceable, and the multiple tremulant motors, each adjustable separately for speed and depth. And the channeling of each stop, the reverb type and depth.

Even this 15 year old entry level organ could take a serious voicer many days to work through, IF a customer wanted to pay for that kind of intensive finishing. But I'm going to have to trust that the "Factory Default" settings for each of the ranks (which is a menu option) will be about right, and then I'll use my ears to tweak individual notes that clearly stick out. I've gone through a reset each rank to default, but I do hear quite a few errant notes, just in a cursory audition.

But I'll make notes every time I practice, and now and then I'll have a little voicing session. This had better be fun, given that I wouldn't have to do any of this on an old MOS organ!