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Hi,
This is my first post on the forum. Please hang on for a bit of history :) I'm not a musician myself and my knowledge about pipe organs is what I learnt during the last couple of weeks, intensively browsing the net (but I've been appreciating organ music from my youth on), so forgive me if I make foolish mistakes or if I express myself not clearly.
I'm a member in our parish (link) for almost 20 years now, but I never heard the main organ in our church playing. It's been installed around 1930, together with the construction of the church. It is (or should I say 'was') a pneumatic organ. From a book published in the '80s, it appears that the organ was evaluated already in the late '70s as 'in state of decay'.
During the '90s two young engineering students have been working hard to replace the pneumatich controls by electronic controls. They were successful, but at some point they left the parish and although the organ was functioning, there was no one left who had the interest or skills to continue its use. In the meanwhile a new electronic organ was installed in the church and we've been using that one. All along, the visit of the old organ became more an more like urban exploring, the console being pulled open, inside the keys, pedals and stops connected to electrical switches and electrical wires dangling out of it and standing next to the console an Atari 1040 ST computer, which nobody remembered how to operate, but which still boots, displaying the files of assembler code that appearantly controlled the whole organ. Inside the organ the lead pipes for the pneumatic control are replaced by plastic ones, the wind chests equipped with rows of solenoids mounted underneath, driving the pistons, the stops driven by electromotors and all this connected by hundreds of wires to custom made circuit boards... This whole scene collected quite some dust over the years.
During the last couple of weeks I inventorized the setup and I came to the astonishing conclusion that our old organ was actually still alive! That is, at least half of it. The basic concept was that the console would produce MIDI signals and the organ is controlled by MIDI signals. I didn't get the console to work, there's no MIDI coming out. But I did get the organ to work, feeding it MIDI signals from my own PC! Some pipes aren't working, quite some are definitely out of tune, the mechanical control of some of the stops is out of order, but conceptually the organ is fine! Within a couple of weeks, I hope to arrange a visit by one of the guys who did the automation, so he may be able to give me some advise.
I would like to continue with the project, so we can make some use of the organ again! Regarding the circumstances, my goal is NOT to restore the instrument to a level at which a professional organ player would be giving a concert for an audience of organ lovers. There are dozens of churches in our city with professionally restored and maintained organs from any era you name, so we can never compete with those. For our Sunday services we rarely use an organ at all and if we use one, it's the newer organ that is installed in the church. Our parish doesn't have the funds for a proper restoration job. My ideas are more like turning it into an 'experimental' organ. E.g. to build some atmosphere by playing MIDI files on it before or after Mass or to involve students (musicians or technical) who may want to do a project on the instrument experimenting with music, electronics or hardware. We'll see...
OK, so far for the history. I hope you found the story and my plans interesting (and not too shocking). But I also have a concrete question, which I hope someone here might be able to help with (apart from any suggestions you may have for the project!).
My actual question is about stop registration in MIDI files. The stops of our organ are encoded as notes (in the range 92-110, channels 1, 2 and 3). From the internet, I learnt that there's no real standard available for encoding stops in MIDI files. My first challenge would be (also because the console isn't working), as a test case, to be able to play a set of MIDI files which I downloaded from the Magle International Music Forum (link). They originate from the Sound Canvas Pipe Organ Project (link) and are recorded for the "Roland Sound Canvas". I've been examining the MIDI files and they have a lot of SysEx messages that most probably define the stops to be used, but I've got no clue on how to find out which stops are actually meant, in order for me to be able to re-encode them to match our organ stops. I've read the "Roland System Exclusive Implementation" (link), but it's only explaining the syntax of the messages, not the actual content.
Here's a sample of one of the MIDI files, with the SysEx messages written as plain text: (link). The gray columns contain (I think) the "address" of the SysEx message, and the data that follows would then be what's actually been set. On line 49 there's a meta text that says "Stops", so the data must definitely have something to do with it...
Best regards,
Vic
Here's a gift: a series of (uncensored) photo's taken during the last couple of weeks, showing al sorts of details of the organ (link) -- Caution: might contain disturbing content for sensitive classical pipe organ lovers ;-).
This is my first post on the forum. Please hang on for a bit of history :) I'm not a musician myself and my knowledge about pipe organs is what I learnt during the last couple of weeks, intensively browsing the net (but I've been appreciating organ music from my youth on), so forgive me if I make foolish mistakes or if I express myself not clearly.
I'm a member in our parish (link) for almost 20 years now, but I never heard the main organ in our church playing. It's been installed around 1930, together with the construction of the church. It is (or should I say 'was') a pneumatic organ. From a book published in the '80s, it appears that the organ was evaluated already in the late '70s as 'in state of decay'.
During the '90s two young engineering students have been working hard to replace the pneumatich controls by electronic controls. They were successful, but at some point they left the parish and although the organ was functioning, there was no one left who had the interest or skills to continue its use. In the meanwhile a new electronic organ was installed in the church and we've been using that one. All along, the visit of the old organ became more an more like urban exploring, the console being pulled open, inside the keys, pedals and stops connected to electrical switches and electrical wires dangling out of it and standing next to the console an Atari 1040 ST computer, which nobody remembered how to operate, but which still boots, displaying the files of assembler code that appearantly controlled the whole organ. Inside the organ the lead pipes for the pneumatic control are replaced by plastic ones, the wind chests equipped with rows of solenoids mounted underneath, driving the pistons, the stops driven by electromotors and all this connected by hundreds of wires to custom made circuit boards... This whole scene collected quite some dust over the years.
During the last couple of weeks I inventorized the setup and I came to the astonishing conclusion that our old organ was actually still alive! That is, at least half of it. The basic concept was that the console would produce MIDI signals and the organ is controlled by MIDI signals. I didn't get the console to work, there's no MIDI coming out. But I did get the organ to work, feeding it MIDI signals from my own PC! Some pipes aren't working, quite some are definitely out of tune, the mechanical control of some of the stops is out of order, but conceptually the organ is fine! Within a couple of weeks, I hope to arrange a visit by one of the guys who did the automation, so he may be able to give me some advise.
I would like to continue with the project, so we can make some use of the organ again! Regarding the circumstances, my goal is NOT to restore the instrument to a level at which a professional organ player would be giving a concert for an audience of organ lovers. There are dozens of churches in our city with professionally restored and maintained organs from any era you name, so we can never compete with those. For our Sunday services we rarely use an organ at all and if we use one, it's the newer organ that is installed in the church. Our parish doesn't have the funds for a proper restoration job. My ideas are more like turning it into an 'experimental' organ. E.g. to build some atmosphere by playing MIDI files on it before or after Mass or to involve students (musicians or technical) who may want to do a project on the instrument experimenting with music, electronics or hardware. We'll see...
OK, so far for the history. I hope you found the story and my plans interesting (and not too shocking). But I also have a concrete question, which I hope someone here might be able to help with (apart from any suggestions you may have for the project!).
My actual question is about stop registration in MIDI files. The stops of our organ are encoded as notes (in the range 92-110, channels 1, 2 and 3). From the internet, I learnt that there's no real standard available for encoding stops in MIDI files. My first challenge would be (also because the console isn't working), as a test case, to be able to play a set of MIDI files which I downloaded from the Magle International Music Forum (link). They originate from the Sound Canvas Pipe Organ Project (link) and are recorded for the "Roland Sound Canvas". I've been examining the MIDI files and they have a lot of SysEx messages that most probably define the stops to be used, but I've got no clue on how to find out which stops are actually meant, in order for me to be able to re-encode them to match our organ stops. I've read the "Roland System Exclusive Implementation" (link), but it's only explaining the syntax of the messages, not the actual content.
Here's a sample of one of the MIDI files, with the SysEx messages written as plain text: (link). The gray columns contain (I think) the "address" of the SysEx message, and the data that follows would then be what's actually been set. On line 49 there's a meta text that says "Stops", so the data must definitely have something to do with it...
Best regards,
Vic
Here's a gift: a series of (uncensored) photo's taken during the last couple of weeks, showing al sorts of details of the organ (link) -- Caution: might contain disturbing content for sensitive classical pipe organ lovers ;-).
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