Newly Purchased!

[Jennifer Saks]

Tuesday we purchased a new (to us) Rodgers Scarborough 110 organ. I am so happy! We had an Allen spinet organ that was quite nice in its day for a home organ, and was purchased by my parents when I was 7 years old for me to learn on. That was (gasp!) 53 years ago. It served me well even though I kind of outgrew it as far as its capabilities went, but in recent years it's not been playable because some of the keys were not functioning. I started watching Craigslist, etc. and last week we found something too good to pass up! The ONLY thing I have found wrong is that the pads under the keys are going to need replacing one of these days. There is a definite clacking sound, but it's not horrible, and considering I'm so out of practice anyway, I can't be too choosy at this point. This organ was a church organ and never had another owner until they decided to sell it and get a newer organ.

We did find a wonderful old-school orgain repairman who has been doing this type of work for nearly 50 years!! We visited his workshop today and it was a veritable museum of organs!! He demonstrated about 6 of them for us...so fun!! And then he took me to his room where he has boxes and boxes and boxes of organ music...all free for me to take what I wanted. I didn't want to be too greedy, but I found several treasures. One that I was going to buy online: the Flor Peeters Little Organ Book. And several offertory books as well as a hardbound volume of preludes, postludes, etc. Wonderful stuff! We did get a ballpark quote on fixing those worn-down pads, and it wasn't horrible...but something we'll need wait awhile on.

Since I was very limited in registration capabilities on my other organ and only once in awhile had an opportunity to play a pipe organ (I started filling in for my teacher's church one or two weeks each year starting when I was 12, but he showed me which stops to choose and laid it all out for me)...anyway, I am very uneducated as to how to choose appropriate registration for music. What I did learn is too dim in my memory. I will be playing classical (Bach, Handel, etc.) and hymns, and just for my own pleasure, but I'd like to be doing it right. I also think we need some better speakers, because after hearing those organs this afternoon I realize that's a big part of getting good sound quality out of my organ.

Is there anyone on this forum who has the same (or very similar) organ I have and could give me some tips? Or do you know if Rodgers has put out a book on the subject? Since each organ has different choices, I'd really like to find something I could study re: what the various voices are for and what music their qualities are meant for, how to combine and couple them, etc. HELP!
Thanks,
Jennifer

[toasterDude]

Or do you know if Rodgers has put out a book on the subject?

Hi Jennifer and welcome to the forum! Perhaps this may be helpful to you:

http://lds.org/cm/pdf/OrganManual_Ro...gh_110_eng.pdf

Hope this helps. Congratulations on your find-

Scott

[arie v]

Jennifer,

These rubber bumpers in keyboards, presents a universal problem down the road, as the rubber dries out, get brittle, and then breaks, giving you noisy keys.

I'm not sure what keyboards were used in the Scarborough from the 70s, but my guess is that they were Pratt-Reed. If so, new ones can be sourced from Organ Service Corp. Rodgers also sourced keyboards from Lo Duca, but that would have been in the 80s.

Besides getting this problem fixed, you may want to have the organ tuned and voiced for the room. That can make a big difference. Changing speakers is a possibility, but you have to remember that with these analog organs, Rodgers voiced them with these speakers as the final filter. In other words, the organ could sound worse thru different speakers, even though technically they are better.

Enjoy, your new to you instrument. For the most part, a very durable machine.

AV

[rodgers110]

Congratulations on your find. As my name implys, I have a 1975 110-II.
Does yours have internal or external speakers?
Do you have a PRACTICE PANEL or an ECHO ADAPTER?

You are indeed most fortunate.
Let me know the answers to the above and I can fill in some more details.

Dave

[Jennifer Saks]

Thanks all! Dave...I don't have a practice panel. What came with the organ are two external speakers (not Rodgers) and an amplifier...no internal speakers in the organ itself. There is a headphone jack on the amplifier and I'm using that. Not sure what an echo adapter is...??? I have a hunch the speakers are not very good ones, and ever so often I hear a crackle through them. The amplifier is not that great, either. We actually have one we aren't using that is better, and I'm thinking I ought to take that in and hook it up instead of the one we got with the organ.

Arie, you're probably quite right about getting the organ voiced for the room. The repairman we visited the other day played several organs for us in his warehouse that were hooked up to nice speakers and it sounded like a cathedral in that cement warehouse!! That's what I'd like to achieve here if I can. Re: speakers--any advice? We don't have a lot of extra room now with this larger organ, so taller and skinnier would fit better than something short and squat. But sound is the most important thing and I don't really know what to look for. Rodgers speakers would probably be best, but might be cost-prohibitive. We do have several rather nice speakers sitting out in the garage that are left over from our son's various experiments with sound some years back, and he doesn't want them. I could have him hook those up to see how they sound. Our son has some know-how in this area, but he's also got VERY good taste. So do I, but we don't have a lot of spare change lying around right now. :)

All in all, I think we got a nice deal and I do feel really fortunate. The organ cost us $500 and he delivered it 100 miles and set it up for us, so that saved us some cash there. As I said, I think the speakers and amp are junk, but we can work around that. Dave...any details you can help me with will be most welcome!!
Jennifer

[Jennifer Saks]

Just realized what you're asking about the echo adapter...I don't know what it is,but I do have two stops that say "echo on" and "main off"....do I need something to make those work? (because they don't) And what do they do for the organ?
Jennifer

[Jennifer Saks]

Scott, Thank you for sending the pdf of the owner's manual. I did get that with the organ, but what I'm hoping to find is a book or maybe something put out by Rodgers (although I don't think there is one on the older organs...just the new digitals) that goes into some detail about the voices of the various stops and what sorts of music to use each with. I'll find something...I know there must be some organ technique book that would tell me those things, even though it won't be Rodgers-specific (which is what I'd REALLY like).
Jennifer

[Menschenstimme]

I am happy for you, Jennifer!
Rodgers designed the organ such that the stops would be used much as the same stop names on a pipe organ. This is also known as registration. May I suggest that you do internet searches for the following:

organ stop registration
hymn organ registration
organ stop combinations
pipe organ stops
pipe organ voices

Good luck and God bless!

[indianajo]

I have a hunch the speakers are not very good ones, and ever so often I hear a crackle through them. The amplifier is not that great, either. We actually have one we aren't using that is better, and I'm thinking I ought to take that in and hook it up instead of the one we got with the organ.

Putting your speakers about a foot from the wall pointing towards the long axis of the room will accentuate what bass they have. Think of the concert hall in Vienna on New Years Eve, and where the orchestra sits. That is ideal.
If you can't pick up actual rogers, allen, or other serious organ speakers, I would watch craigslist for a Peavey SP7. Used they go about $400 a pair, if one of the pair is blown, even better, big discount. Be sure to listen to any speakers you intend to buy with a CD with a full frequency range for the speaker. Use significant power. A speaker with a torn cone or bad suspension is worth less if you can't find repair parts. The SP7 has a full set of transducer parts currently available.
As far as organ registration, I suggest listening to organ albums you like, then trying to match the sounds. The big bargains in organ records right now is at the charity resale shop, in LP's. CD's are about $2.50 each here, but the "must buy classical" ethos was more prevalent in the sixties, and there are a lot of classical LP's practically unplayed in the bins at $.50 each.

[rodgers110]

Jennifer,
I sent you a private message.
Look in your profile.

Dave

[Jennifer Saks]

You folks are very kind! Thanks so much for the nice comments and helpfulness. I have found several online books that are going to be very helpful, I think. One is "A Primer of Organ Registration" by Gordon Balch Nevin (written in 1919!!) and downloaded as a .pdf. It's very thorough and should really help...you can search this out and download it for free if you are interested. It's all about pipe organs, but should translate over well enough. After the limited choices on my old Allen I have a few things to learn! Tonight before church I played around on our Allen digital 3 manual organ...that was fun! I have a friend who is a pianist who offered to fill in for the newly retired organist until they find someone, and of course she knows very little about organ registration. I was able to help her a bit to come up with some nice-sounding registrations for hymns. Our former organist never really opened this organ up to show what it could do, so it was fun to do that myself in a small way.

[Nitsua337]

I'm new to playing the organ and to this forum, but I found an excellent little book called "An Introduction to Organ Registration," by James Engel ($10 from the OHS catalog http://www.ohscatalog.org/metinbook.html). It seems to be more pipe-oriented, but should work for digital instruments as well. Joyce Jones' method book "King of Instruments" ($24.95 from OHS) also has some useful tips on registration, and is aimed at church musicians already possessing some piano/keyboard experience, so thus is mostly hymn-based. By the way I'm looking forward to playing a pipe organ for the first time, my church's III/37 Austin, that our organist is graciously allowing me time on before Thursday night choir rehearsals. This is the instrument pictured in my avatar.
Good luck with learning about registration…sometimes the best thing to do is just to try different combinations of stops and see what sounds good to you. I have studied piano for most of my life, and have a pretty good theoretical knowledge about the organ (mostly thanks to this forum!)…now if I could only get a job so I can afford some real organ lessons!

[myorgan]

Is there anyone on this forum who has the same (or very similar) organ I have and could give me some tips? Or do you know if Rodgers has put out a book on the subject? Since each organ has different choices, I'd really like to find something I could study re: what the various voices are for and what music their qualities are meant for, how to combine and couple them, etc. HELP!

Jennifer,

I'm not sure if this is too late or not, but you may consider visiting the following website for free downloads of some of the texts referred to in previous posts. Check out the Prelinger Archives. You can also find all sorts of media archived there.

I hope this helps you in your search.

Michael

[Jan Girardot]

Hi, Jennifer;

If you haven't already dealt with the "clacking" keyboards, be advised that your keyboards (probably Pratt-Read as Arie said) can be rebuilt, with all the
hardened synthetic rubber upstop bumpers replaced with fresh ones. Since leaving Rodgers (when your organ was built) I have rebuilt many, many of them and suspect your Portland tech can take care of that at a reasonable cost.

Best of luck,

. . . Jan
the OrganGrinder

[myorgan]

If you haven't already dealt with the "clacking" keyboards, be advised that your keyboards (probably Pratt-Read as Arie said) can be rebuilt, . . . .

Jan,

I hope you all (especially Jennifer) don't mind me stepping on this thread a bit, but I've noticed the same thing from all my Allens. I've noticed the "clacking" keyboards, especially as I let up on the keys. Should they be re-felted?

Michael