Pipe organ

It was my sons wedding today at a pretty old church in Birmingham Alabama built in 1889 or 1898
They have a pipe organ there, that was made in the year 2000 and it took them two years to make it and then fly it in from
France. This thing has 11,000 pipe. Yes I said 11k of pipes. And the sound it WOW
Here’s a few pics I was able to get before I got Caught lol. I have some more so when I get home I will post them
IMG_2578.jpg IMG_2582.jpg IMG_2622.jpg IMG_2617.jpg IMG_2580.jpg
 
I lived and studied in two Catholic boarding schools in Germany and here in Portugal and I was ever fascinated when the organist played Bachs Toccata and Fugue …
I remember going at young age and at that time to a "new modern church" in Neviges Germany and I think it was the best speaker I've heard in my life. The sound reverberating was something Glorious...
 
I am familiar with "romantic" voiced organs refered to as "French." The sides on the mouth of the pipes make it have fewer harmonics than a "baroque" version.

I can't quite make out the denomination of the church my guess would be Episcopalian. Not a denomination I would expect to have a large congregation in Alabama.

I do prefer the romantic voicing on pipe organs. A bit rare around here.

The size would probably place it among the ten largest working organs.
 
Birmingham is the Pittsburgh of the South, a town which was hardly in existence at the time of our Civil War -- not until they found large deposits of iron ore and coking coal. The Sloss Furnaces were the largest pig iron foundry in the world at one time.

We were at a wedding there a month ago. The wedding was at a small Episcopal Church and the reception up on the mountain. It's a remarkable city.
 
I think we still have a couple churches with pipes in this area. Problem in winter for smaller churches is heat. Small churches often turn off the heat all week and only heat on SUndays. COld pipes go out of tune.

We used to have a pizza joint with a huge pipe organ installation. Tin Lizzie maybe? Much was behind glass, near the entrance was a 750 horsepower motor running the blower. You could watch a big row of tremulant bellows hopping up and down. Big clear plastic flaps for swell, in front of the rows of pipes. Along the rear of the room were rows of brass instruments. And even odd percussion things like jingle bells. Big sign identified it as "The Mighty Wurlitzer Pipe Organ". Oh, and the console was hidden below the floor, and for performances, the organist on his keyboard rose up through the floor to entertain.

Pipe organs are fascinating. And yes indeed they can shatter your chest with sound.
 
...pipe organ...And the sound of it WOW...
Maybe a decade ago, my wife and I were in Balboa Park, San Diego. We'd just come out of an art gallery into an open central area of the park when this astonishing music began to fill the air. The sound came from everywhere at once, with a power and spaciousness I had never encountered before. It was absolutely amazing!

I didn't know it at the time, but this is what we had been listening to: Spreckels Organ Pavilion | Balboa Park

I cannot say that classical organ music is dear to my soul, but I can certainly say that listening to the sounds that organ made are among the most astonishing sensory experiences I've had in my life. Wow.


-Gnobuddy
 
It can't be 11k pipes. Looks like this one BirminghamAGO POE - Stoplists . 82 stops, not all of which are real (some digital). Albert hall with 10k pipes is 147 stops.

If that is the actual stop list, I count a little over 3000 pipes, The solo division
is played from all the other divisions but only has 1 set of pipes for the division.

I count 10 ranks on great, 19 on swell, 9 on choir, 5 on solo and 9 for pedal.
Manual ranks are 61 pipes and pedal ranks are 32. Where you see "ext." that
is an extension (1 octave) of an existing rank so add 12 pipes.

Far from 11,000 but with the digital ranks for 32' stops would be a very pleasant
instrument. Clearly not tracker action as you can't couple individual ranks, only
complete divisions.

 
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Oh no doubt it's a lovely instrument. My personal fave is the kings college chapel organ in Cambridge (the original cambridge). There was a brief period in my childhood when I could sing and I did once sing evensong there. From the choir stalls you get a great perspective on the sound.
 
If that is the actual stop list, I count a little over 3000 pipes, The solo division
is played from all the other divisions but only has 1 set of pipes for the division.

I count 10 ranks on great, 19 on swell, 9 on choir, 5 on solo and 9 for pedal.
Manual ranks are 61 pipes and pedal ranks are 32. Where you see "ext." that
is an extension (1 octave) of an existing rank so add 12 pipes.

Far from 11,000 but with the digital ranks for 32' stops would be a very pleasant
instrument. Clearly not tracker action as you can't couple individual ranks, only
complete divisions.

Could be true because some stops (e.g. mixture) contain several ranks of pipes, 4, 5, even up to 12.
 
I very much enjoy pipe organ concerts. We have nearly a dozen a year in southern Indiana sponsored by the local chapter of American Guild of Organists. Real full frequency sound with 100 foot delay lines (sanctuaries) make for an amazing experience. I'm learning to play some on the electronic organs in my inventory below.
I'm helping install a 11 rank pipe organ in an Episcopal church in Jeffersonville IN. It has electronic control, no trackers for the 70 year old installer leading this job. The scanner-decoder from syndyne has a dual twisted pair control cable from console to pipe chamber, to allow the console to be pushed around the floor for services or weddings or concerts. Weird connectors, I had to install them myself on Cat 5 cable, or pay syndyne's price. There is a single 120 vac 3SO cord to the console also.
There are lots of electronics challenges. Turning on the blower without a second 120 vac line in the cable was the first. Since the console switcher supply only draws 3 W idle, instead of using a $120 current sense relay on the AC line to the console to activate the blower, I installed a $35 radio car starter gadget on the console and hot wired the console AC to the blower relay contacts. Push unlock button on the remote, the blower and console both power up.
Yesterday the electronics won. I was trying to hook up the Petersen swell engine that moves the volume shutters. The syndyne output board is not doing anything says volts on my DVM, although .5 v to 4.8 v swell pedal signal is getting to the console encoder board. From the decoder board in the chamber there are 16 outputs that are supposed to supply 1 of 8 14 v signals to the Petersen swell engine. (motor, crank, control boards run from 14 v). Outputs of the 2405 decoder board are open emitter transistors. I'll take a 100 ohm resistor down there tomorrow to connect the 8 outputs (one at a time) to minus to see if there is a signal with my dvm. Else the 20 year old syndyne board encoder (console) or decoder board (chamber) may have to be replaced ($$$$). Alternately I might replace that board with a stage light control circuit from the PA market since those have optical link and seem to be very cheap in the catalogs.
Another problem is the output to the zimblestern 30 v dc motor. I built a board to control 32 v from a printer/copier/fax power supply on switched AC in the basement, with the 14 v signal from the syndyne output board. The board I built also has a regulator transistor to slow down the zimblestern by dropping the 30 v to as low as 15 under pot control. It worked nicely for a few times, but now the syndyne output is turning on nicely but never turning off. Switching to another spare output is in the future, since the control signal from the zimb tab on the console is actually moving between 14 and zero properly. These syndyne boards were bought about 1985 and never installed, so no checkout under warrenty occured. I'm hoping the pipe solenoid outputs don't have the 30% failure rate I've experienced on the auxillary outputs. If syndyne failures continue at the 30% rate, a midi encoder/decoder setup ($1500) is in the future, probably midiboutique since all the other manufacturers of 5 years ago seem to have blown away in the winds of commerce.
I also built a resistor plus selector voltage regulator in the pipe chamber for the chime 40 VAC from the basement. Chimes have a seven tap 20-40 Transformer usually installed in the console, plus a selector switch, but that means 8 more wires from the console to the pipe chamber if installed that way. Traditional console setups include usually 180 wires from console to pipe chamber, something totally incompatible with a mobile console and certainly expensive these days when everything is multiplexed on cat 5 twisted pair.
 
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If syndyne failures continue at the 30% rate, a midi encoder/decoder setup ($1500) is in the future, probably midiboutique since all the other manufacturers of 5 years ago seem to have blown away in the winds of commerce.
I've seen a few restored and one or 2 new pipe organs and wondered why they don't use MIDI. It's been around forever and seems robust. But now I understand the difficulty of finding good encoders.

That's for the info. Sure sounds like a giant job with all the fun and frustration you could ever want. :D
 
I've seen a few restored and one or 2 new pipe organs and wondered why they don't use MIDI. It's been around forever and seems robust. But now I understand the difficulty of finding good encoders.

That's for the info. Sure sounds like a giant job with all the fun and frustration you could ever want. :D

haskey.com - John Haskey - Residence Pipe Organ

When I built this little 2 rank organ in '88-'90 I used MIDI and wrote all the code in assembly for 8031 processors. 1 proc for each keyboard/pedals where I designed and built the switching for the keys and pedals including velocity, 1 processor for stops and 1 for decoding the pipe drives. There were actually 2 procs running the same decode program because there are 2 separate windchests and a second processor greatly simplified the wiring. Mixture stops were duplexed from the 2 ranks and the tables were downloaded via SYSEX messages from the console stops computer meaning the mixture composition and break points can be changed. MIDI only supports 7 data bits as the MSB is used for "status" (more accurately command) so transmitting 8 bits converted 3 8 bit bytes to 4 6 bits and then reconstruct. This is a little more involved for encode/decode but is a little faster in that I use 4 byte times for 3 bytes versus 6 byte times for 3 bytes if you just use 4 bit bytes.

I used a commercial MIDI combiner to merge the keyboards and stops control to 1 MIDI stream. MIDI was back then was a 31.25 kbaud link (damned slow) and you do run into just a little latency even with 2 ranks but with careful design many more ranks wouldn't cause problems UNLESS you attempted to copy data for multiple divisions. Proper receive decoding avoids the problem.

With only 2 ranks unified and duplexed there are multiple requests for a pipe to speak so there is a counter for each pipe (software) that is incremented for each turn on and decremented for each turn off. If the number is >0 it plays that pipe. Stop changes were also interesting in that a stop change has to regenerate all the "note on/off" to actually change the stops. This had to be done in the decoder because it takes WAY too much time to retransmit the MIDI data. The goal was to allow any data combination and only do what was defined and ignore invalid MIDI and I believe I achieved it.

The little 8031s were running for about all they were worth but I experimented with variable attack time from MIDI velocity to simulate tracker action response and found it CAN be done but needs more horsepower than the old 8031s could deliver.

I won't get into the chest design and pressure regulators but that was involved as well and if you listen to the example files it actually worked pretty well. What I CAN say is you DON'T want one of these as the ambient temperature and barometric pressure changes the tuning - A LOT and there are temperature variations in the room that cause to lower chest pipes to change differently from the upper chest. I was looking into a way to measure air density to force the sampler clock to track the real pipes.

I sold it before I got that far nor did I get to finish the sampler system to make it a hybrid pipe/digital but I DID get to play Gigastudio from the console just before I sold it. It would have been impressive. I wish I still had the console as it was a perfect interface for a Hauptwerk system. Oh well...

 
What I CAN say is you DON'T want one of these as the ambient temperature and barometric pressure changes the tuning - A LOT and there are temperature variations in the room that cause to lower chest pipes to change differently from the upper chest. I was looking into a way to measure air density to force the sampler clock to track the real pipes.

On the Jeffersonville Indiana installation the church heats and cools the sanctuary 24/7 so we are hoping temperature variations don't cause tuning problems. The installer with 30 years experience has put some techniques in the pipe chamber to ensure even temperatures across the ranks. One feature is no pipes exposed to the room ambient.
 
The most difficult to control was the temperature gradients that changed upper tuning vs lower tuning. I would run a fan in the room for a while to get it all mixed so you could hear it in tune for a while. You'll also find the reed pipes do not change the same amount as the flue pipes.