I'm really pleased that this event is finally happening. Sadly I left that church and the area in July last year, and have been without a regular organist job since. I miss that organ more than any other I have played regularly, which is odd considering the church before it was a big Willis III. I'd always hated electronic organs and not regarded the ones I had encountered as musical instruments, just a collection of vaguely organ like noises to be endured.
Indeed, the original Copeman Hart at Boldre was much the same. But, when it blew up on me during a wedding, and I was able to bypass the CH tone generation stuff and replace it with Hauptwerk (with Haverhill initially), it was a major change. I started to enjoy it. The CH console was very well made, very precise, the audio system was also very good, so with a decent sampleset and a lot of voicing, it started to feel like an instrument.
When David Butcher let me try the Hereford Beta (at home), I knew that it was going to be a perfect fit for the church, albeit with a lot of the Hereford acoustic take out. And it was. Apologies to those who've heard this story before...
There are compromises. There are always compromises! At the time we bought the Mac for the church, 8Gb RAM was the max that would go in the Core 2 Duo machines. So, I had to squeeze as much of Hereford as I needed into 8Gb. Hereford had more stops than the console had, and I *needed* some of them
Paul Kuzan kindly gave me an Xkeys which allowed me to stick a few extra buttons under the music desk.
The terms of the faculty (church planning permission) were that we couldn't modify the console (except to change a few stops), so things like adding proper on/off/shutdown buttons were not an option. Again, that had to be on the X keys. We also couldn't change the speaker setup or modify anything visual in any way.
I experimented a lot with audio routing - there are 3 stereo speaker pairs and a mono sub. At first I replicated what CH had done; choir to one pair, swell to another, great and pedal 8' to the last pair. That was ok. I lived with it for about a year. But, the best result came from carefully balancing all the speakers so that they were the same dB at a specific point in the church (using a dB meter from my school science lab), then throwing everything at all 6 speakers and letting Hauptwerk decide what to do (apart from the stuff that went to the sub). That brought some oddities for the choir members, who found that due to the speaker arrangement, they thought that some notes were missing on the organ (most obvious on the tuba). They weren't missing, just coming out of the speakers on the wrong side of the arch from them. In the congregation it sounds great, but the choir stalls are a bit compromised. Tough
I've done a *lot* of voicing. Tiny tweaks over a couple of years. The most obvious ones were personal preference which would upset the Willis purists; all of the swell (except big reeds) +5dB. The solo light pressure reeds and solo flutes +9dB (oboe, clarinet, etc).
If I were to do it over again, I'd replace the sub woofer with one that can properly deal with the bottom 3rd of the 32', I'd get permission to add a couple of speakers just for the choir (people not division) and move the speakers slightly. I'd modify the console to startup and shutdown the computer properly.
I wish I could make it next weekend, but my boy is doing Chichester Psalms and Rejoice in the Lamb solos over the weekend! I'd love to hear what the assembled worthies make of it though - do report back please, Kenneth!