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After we got the Allen MDS-45 at church up and running last week, I played around a bit and noticed right away that the great mixture was very inadequate. Since I hadn't played it in over three months, I was hearing it with fresh ears, and that was one thing that jumped out at me.
The 45 is of course not a huge model as MDS organs go, but it does have the stops divided among 12 different groups for voicing purposes. Each of the 12 groups has a particular stop that I tend to check when doing a cursory evaluation. For example, I'll check group 7A to see if the 8' principal on the great is about the right level, then check group 7AA to see if the 4' octave matches it, and so on around the cage until I've referenced each stop to a couple others.
So I made a mental note that the mixture sounded funny, almost like some of the ranks were missing. But a quick check of the stop to stop balances showed nothing badly amiss, so I was just inclined to think I'd hit upon another quirk of this model, a rather puny and ineffective mixture. I've been using the mixture off the MIDI Ensemble anyway, as I'd thought even before the "lightning" event that the mixture was lousy.
Well, on Saturday I went by the church and decided to take a closer look at the two boards involved in generating the four ranks of the mixture -- boards 7A and 7AA. As noted earlier, the levels of the two boards seemed "about right" as the principal and the octave were in good balance. But when I took a look at the positions of the BTMG pots, I noticed right away that they were quite askew from the more or less "normal" 12:00 positions that I always start with when voicing an organ from scratch.
Returning the pots on both 7A and 7AA to 12:00 immediately produced a dramatic improvement in the mixture. A final bit of tweaking with the gain and treble pots gave me just what I'd been wanting out of the mixture.
The reason for the error -- Board 7AA generates only two voices: the Great Octave 4 and the highest two ranks of the Great mixture. Somehow, in another time, I'd managed to turn the TREBLE pot on that board all the way down! I seem to recall struggling to clean up the Octave way back when we first got the organ. The trouble eventually turned out to be with the "articulation" board and it's contribution to the Octave's tone. But I must've forgotten to turn the treble back up. Thus, the mixture had been crippled all this time, and I just thought it was a bad mixture! With the treble on that board turned all the way down, the top two ranks of the four-rank mixture were practically absent, leaving it pretty darn dull.
Anyway, I was greatly relieved to find it that easy to change the sound of the principal chorus that much with such a simple procedure. At some point, I need to go back through all 12 of the generator boards to make sure I don't have other weird mal-adjustments that are beleaguering the tone.
Even though there are surely other improvements I can make in the future, I was SO happy to have my Allen back again! It was such a thrill to be able to add and retire individual stops and set custom combinations.
The 45 is of course not a huge model as MDS organs go, but it does have the stops divided among 12 different groups for voicing purposes. Each of the 12 groups has a particular stop that I tend to check when doing a cursory evaluation. For example, I'll check group 7A to see if the 8' principal on the great is about the right level, then check group 7AA to see if the 4' octave matches it, and so on around the cage until I've referenced each stop to a couple others.
So I made a mental note that the mixture sounded funny, almost like some of the ranks were missing. But a quick check of the stop to stop balances showed nothing badly amiss, so I was just inclined to think I'd hit upon another quirk of this model, a rather puny and ineffective mixture. I've been using the mixture off the MIDI Ensemble anyway, as I'd thought even before the "lightning" event that the mixture was lousy.
Well, on Saturday I went by the church and decided to take a closer look at the two boards involved in generating the four ranks of the mixture -- boards 7A and 7AA. As noted earlier, the levels of the two boards seemed "about right" as the principal and the octave were in good balance. But when I took a look at the positions of the BTMG pots, I noticed right away that they were quite askew from the more or less "normal" 12:00 positions that I always start with when voicing an organ from scratch.
Returning the pots on both 7A and 7AA to 12:00 immediately produced a dramatic improvement in the mixture. A final bit of tweaking with the gain and treble pots gave me just what I'd been wanting out of the mixture.
The reason for the error -- Board 7AA generates only two voices: the Great Octave 4 and the highest two ranks of the Great mixture. Somehow, in another time, I'd managed to turn the TREBLE pot on that board all the way down! I seem to recall struggling to clean up the Octave way back when we first got the organ. The trouble eventually turned out to be with the "articulation" board and it's contribution to the Octave's tone. But I must've forgotten to turn the treble back up. Thus, the mixture had been crippled all this time, and I just thought it was a bad mixture! With the treble on that board turned all the way down, the top two ranks of the four-rank mixture were practically absent, leaving it pretty darn dull.
Anyway, I was greatly relieved to find it that easy to change the sound of the principal chorus that much with such a simple procedure. At some point, I need to go back through all 12 of the generator boards to make sure I don't have other weird mal-adjustments that are beleaguering the tone.
Even though there are surely other improvements I can make in the future, I was SO happy to have my Allen back again! It was such a thrill to be able to add and retire individual stops and set custom combinations.
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