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”
FluidSynth
Python synth
- Playing music from Python via fluidsynth
- rpi_organ – A multi-keyboard organ built around Raspberry Pi or compatible boards (PDF)
- Music software written in Python
- Py88Keys – A Python package for emulating common keyboard instrument sounds
Other synth
MIDI
- MIDI note numbers
- MIDI for Organists by Colin Pykett
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)