Musical organs: random notes

Difference between great, swell, and choir manuals

When there are only 2 manuals, they are almost always the Great (lower) and Swell (upper) manuals.

The Great organ is generally “unexpressed” (does not have an expression pedal and the pipes are in the open with no shutters); the Swell organ is called that because it is enclosed in a chamber with “swell shades” or shutters controlled by an expression pedal–it is “expressed”.

The Great organ contains a solid set of strong choruses of different types of pipes and is the backbone of the instrument. The Swell often contains some foundation stops but tends to have most of the solo voices when there are only 2 manuals.

When there are 3 manuals, the third one is often called the “Choir” or “Positive”

DAWs – Digital Audio Workstations

Your DAW is where all the audio recording, audio editing, and mixing occur. It’s your mixing console, tape recorder, synth rack, and musical sketchpad, all in one.

There are many commercial digital audio workstations on the market. You are probably familiar with Ableton Live, FL Studio, Studio One, Pro Tools, Cubase, Bitwig, and similar premium DAWs.

FluidSynth

  • Applications using FluidSynth
    FluidSynth is used by many different applications on a wide range of platforms. A list of some of the applications can be found on the Wiki page Applications using FluidSynth.
  • FluidSynth 2.3 Developer Documentation
  • Soundfonts Page
  • The Fluid Release 3 General-MIDI Soundfont
  • Bruce Miles – Soundfonts Page
    Here are two Soundfonts, the ‘English Organ’, and ‘Cinema Organ’. The first contains the sounds or virtual pipework for a ‘straight’ or classical pipe organ of up to about 50 stops. The other, which comes in two versions, those of a Cinema or Theatre organ. They are all in the popular sf.2 format used by several software synthesisers including Fluidsynth. Once installed the Soundfonts with a suitable synthesiser can be played live from any midi-equipped keyboard or console, or even from your computer keyboard or screen. A midi file can be played via your computer sequencer, or in Windows Media player with no extra software.

Python synth

Other synth

MIDI

Each MIDI message consists of three components, each transmitted using 10 short impulses. The time required to send each MIDI message is almost exactly one millisecond.

For a note on an organ keyboard:

  • the first component of the message indicates whether the note has just been keyed or released (note-on or note-off),
  • the second component indicates the note number (e.g. from 1 to 61 on a five-octave keyboard),
  • the third component represents note velocity (i.e. how fast the key was pressed).

For an electric organ the third component (velocity) is of no use, as in most pipe organs there is no way in which the velocity of the key can be measured.

MIDI tools

  • loopMIDI – Virtual loopback MIDI cable for Windows
    This software can be used to create virtual loopback MIDI-ports to interconnect applications on Windows that want to open hardware-MIDI-ports for communication.
    This software uses the virtualMIDI driver to actually create the ports.
  • MIDI Tools
    MIDI Tools is a nifty application, providing various MIDI-related tools.
  • Convert midi file to numpy array (Piano Roll)