Allen MOS-2 Celestes

[myorgan]

I just had to share an experience I had this weekend.

Because of the impending storm going through, my church cancelled, and my wife's church asked me to play organ for their re-scheduled service (earlier). The organ there is my Allen MOS-2 505B on loan to them indefinitely. For the fun of it, I took a couple of cards (Trumpet A 8' & Flute Celeste 8' 4').

With the orchestra, I played a string reduction, and used the Celeste Tuning for the pieces. What a nice sound! I had forgotten how nice the organ sounded, and when I also added the Dulciana 8' and Flutes from the Great, the sound was even more lush. It was only when I accidentally added the Mixture, the specialness of the effect wore off.

I hope you find this useful. It was such an unexpected experience for me.

Michael

[jbird604]

There is no doubt that the celeste of the MOS-2 doubled organs is unsurpassed. When we don't play one all the time, we may forget just how flexible and amazing it was in the day (and still is) to be able to create a true and properly tuned celeste with ANY basic tone. And how lush and rich and shimmering that effect can be.

(I'm wondering how one manages to "accidentally" draw a mixture though ;-) )

Working to augment the richness of celeste tuning itself is the fact that the MOS-2 system incorporates not one but TWO distinct tuning scales in each MOS board. So even without celeste, when you are playing a simple single-computer MOS-2 organ, and you draw two 8' stops that are in opposite channels, there is already a small amount of pitch offset, thus a little movement in the sound that isn't found in MOS-1.

In a doubled MOS-2 model like the 505, 705, 1105, etc., those same two stops drawn would result in FOUR pitch scales coming into play. Each stop is simultaneously being produced by each MOS board, thus contributing two very subtly offset pitches, and the second stop brings in two more! Now when you draw celeste tuning, the tuning spread grows much wider, producing a glorious shimmer that rivals a symphonic violin ensemble!

All this glorious shimmering is further enhanced by the fact that all these individual pitches are coming from their own separate speaker systems. No discordant pitches are forced through any individual speaker. They are all coming out of the speaker without any of the distortion, compression, or out-phasing that would occur if these multiple pitches were being mixed electronically before coming out into the air.

So enjoy that lovely organ whenever you get the chance! For celeste lovers, there simply are no better Allen organs than the doubled MOS-2 models!

One of the few weaknesses of my Renaissance Allen is the somewhat poor production of celeste sounds, beyond the simple celeste stops played alone. Yes, there is a lovely celeste in each division that sounds quite beautiful by itself. But adding an additional stop to the celeste pair results in adding yet a third pitch (because each rank in Renaissance has its own tuning curve) without adding a separate audio channel. So the added rank definitely disturbs the clarity of the celeste. Somehow Allen managed to prevent the addition of stops from causing the distortion and warbling that you might expect to hear in these cases, but it still isn't as clean and lovely as one would like to hear.

If I were to choose one ideal Allen model from all time, one that I could set up in a big space of its own and play when I wanted to, I'd probably go with the largest MOS-2. I'd just want to pass away right on the bench listening to those gorgeous sounds!