"Forcalquier" - a model of a French organ

[zurek]

There is new sample set available from Sonus Paradisi. French organ modelled after the picturesque sound of the Forcalquier cathedral organ.
In mid 19th century, Prosper Antoine Moitessier rebuilt the old organ in the church, reusing also the ancient material. The Grand orgue had 22 stops, Récit expressif and Pedal with 4 stops. The organbuilders Cavaillé-Coll – Mutin made further reconstruction in 1932. They extended the pedal board range and changed the action to the pneumatic one. Recently, the organ was carefully restored and enlarged in two steps in 1981 and 2000 by Alain Sals. The action was changed back to the mechanical one, new Positif de dos was installed using some old pipes, some new stops were added, so that now the organ has 36 speaking stops.
The composition and the timbre of the organ is typically French, rather sharp, "chiffy", with a strong feeling of „inégalité“, i. e. there are numerous voicing breaks where suddenly the timbre of the stop changes. The most prominent one is the division of the Voix humaine of the Récit, which is in fact composed of two different stops, one for the Bass part and the other for the Treble part of the keyboard compass.
The most revolutionary step in the "realism" of this sample set is the modellation of the antient and the most traditional way of the wind supply. Our Hauptwerk model offers 4 wedge bellows operated by hidden calcants which provide very delicate wind supply to the instrument. The small instabilities caused by this way of air pumping add greatly to the "realism" of the Hauptwerk model. There are demos which demonstrate the difference in the resulting sound when the model is and is not used. Learn more at: http://www.sonusparadisi.com/organs/forq/history.0.asp

(As I had some problems with the Internet services during last days, I hope that everything is corrected now. If you find a bad link, please, write an e-mail to me.)

[Fazioli]

Very nice!

[Grant_Youngman]

The most revolutionary step in the "realism" of this sample set is the modellation of the antient and the most traditional way of the wind supply. )

The wind modeling is an important aspect of this sample set. It would be instructive and also useful in the purchase decision for those of use in the US, beaten down by corporate intellectual property and patent interests, to have the same demo pieces available with the wind model disabled as a side by side comparison.

The demos are very nice ...

Thanks ..

[Anton Heger]

Sorry for this question, but...

The composition and the timbre of the organ is typically French, rather sharp, "chiffy", with a strong feeling of „inégalité“

Is this the definition of 'typical French' organs?
Listening to CC-organs I have not this feeling with that sound.
Is this new organ more or less an CC organ? Or more a French baroque type?

I am waiting for a CC organ, sampled by Sonus Paradisi...

[imcg110]

The wind modeling is an important aspect of this sample set. It would be instructive and also useful in the purchase decision for those of use in the US, beaten down by corporate intellectual property and patent interests, to have the same demo pieces available with the wind model disabled as a side by side comparison.

Jiri has always provided voicing capability separate from the HW engine for those on basic edition. I get the impression that the wind modelling here may also be separate, ie intrinsic to the sample set and therefore may be available to all users?????

Perhaps he could clarify.

Very nice instrument though!! I particularly like the close up positif - it makes it feel much more like sitting at a console and not somewhere down the church nave.

[www.orgeljournal.de]

@ Jiri

An interesting project!

Would you like to post some demos without your wind model (value “0”)?

Many thanks and best regards,
Matthias

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www.Orgeljournal.de
www.MusikundTheologie.de
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[mdyde]

Hello Iain,

Jiri has always provided voicing capability separate from the HW engine for those on basic edition. I get the impression that the wind modelling here may also be separate, ie intrinsic to the sample set and therefore may be available to all users?????

It is deliberately not possible to implement any kind of wind supply model within Hauptwerk in any way other than using its native wind supply model. There are two reasons:

1. We (Crumhorn Labs) rely on sales of the Advanced Edition for our main income (the Basic Edition is intentionally priced as low as possible to be affordable to students and others that would otherwise not be able to afford it). Trying to get around feature limitations of the Basic Edition does us (and Hauptwerk's future) no favours!

2. We don't make any kind of wind model available in the USA to avoid any potential legal issues. We're similarly keen to avoid any potential legal issues that might arise for us from any means existing within Hauptwerk by which a third-party could potentially construct their own wind model.

So I'm very sorry to those of you in the US that don't have a wind model - I wish it was otherwise, but that's the way it has to be.

[Eric Sagmuller]

Can someone please explain to me why a wind model is not allowed in the USA?

Thanks

[Grant_Youngman]

Can someone please explain to me why a wind model is not allowed in the USA?

Thanks

There is thought to be a well known US organ manufacturer who has a patent on all things wind. Apparently it is not a valid patent anywhere else, but whoever holds it has decided to leave his home boys with the short end of the stick.

[Jim Reid]

Some other company, building electronic instruments, owns
an existing patent which "seems" to cover the same concept which
Martin has realized for the HW wind model system. There exits the
possible threat of lawsuit against Cumhorn Labs should Martin
include the wind model in his application when sold in the US.
As Martin's business is fairly small compared to the other firm, he
could not possibly afford to defend his sales against their attorneys.

Thus, not to be sold in the US. Too bad, as so far as I know, the
other firm has never, and does not now, offer a wind model in
any of their existing products sold in the US, nor anywhere else for
that matter; but so goes the world of business in the US. There are
many other examples of product features or entire products held
off the US market for similar reasons, unfortunately.

[Eric Sagmuller]

Thanks for the explanation.

[zurek]

I am very happy about the enthusiasm the sample set woke up. Today, I will send approx. first 10 sample sets (I cannot get more copies ready unfortunately during one day...), other copies will be sent next week, so there might be several days delay before all orders are shipped.

To Anton: the organ is surely NOT a Cavailé-Coll organ, it is surely pre-CC organ. But since it was not conserved to us in the Montessier form, the restorer did not seem to respect any particular historical state and he built, in fact, a modern instrument using the old material carefully and he used historically aware style of organbuilding (technology, material...). So, the present form of the organ seems to be strongly inspired by the type of an old French organ but there are stops (like Soubasse, Sifflet or Gambe) which do not fit into the frame of a "baroque" French organ. However, these stops add greatly to the color possibilities of the instrument.

To imcg110: there is no wind model apart from HW engine wind model. After deep investigations of the possibilities of the wind modelling in Hauptwerk, I have to say that Martin's work is absolutely excellent (exceeding my original expectations). I only hope that the patent rights will expire soon, because it is such a tremendous realism difference that I regret very much that the wind model is not available everywhere.
I am also indebted very much to Mr. Hendrik Hooiker who gave me time consuming and extremely detailed lessons on the historical wind design during the recent months. Mr. Hooiker is the leading organ acoustic engineer in Netherlands who is in charge of the current Zwolle restoration. We are now trying to simulate the original winding of the Zwolle organ to see what the possible result of the ongoing restoration process of the Zwolle instrument may be. You can visit the Zwolle web pageto see and download (from the update page) the BETA release of the Zwolle sample set with the original wind routing (you have to own the Zwolle sample set to use this add-on). It must still be finished in some details but basically, it is spectacular what the difference in the sound it is.

Regarding the proprietary Sonus Paradisi voicing: Originally, we decided to built a simple voicing facilities to our sample sets separated from HW native voicing for one simple reason. As you remember, the original release of HW2 did not have voicing because its development was postponed to later time. We wanted our users to have the advantage of using voicing even at that time and because of this, we decided to develop our own voicing which therefore work even in the basic edition of Hauptwerk. However, it has to be said that our voicing is only "basic", it is a "per rank" voicing (whole stop at the same time and equally for all pipes of that stop), it is not "per pipe" voicing as the native HW voicing. So, you can use it to change the timbre of the entire stop, but you cannot use it for correcting or altering voicing of an individual pipe.

To Matthias: the demo preparation is for me very time consuming and I am very inclined to spend my time on the development of sample sets rather than making demo pieces. I kindly invite my users to supply decent demo pieces which I would then use on my internet pages. Also, I offer big discount to those who supply nice demo pieces (at least 25 minutes of music, live performance) - these users get the reviewer discount of 40%. If you want to get the idea, what the sound is without the wind model, listen to the Bach Partita, it is rather "dead" compared to the "living" sound of the Buxtehude demo.

And last: I forgot to mention earlier, that the sample set of Forcalquier is again (as St. Carlo) in the try-before-buy regime, so everyone can get it for short testing for free and only if the sample set is found to be useful and pleasing only then the user is obliged to pay for it. So, you can order the sample set, try it out with and without the wind model and see what is the difference. (Since there are many orders now, it can get some time before your possible order is processed - perhaps 3-4 bussiness days - I am not shipping and processing orders during weekends).

[Anton Heger]

Quote from Jiri:

I am also indebted very much to Mr. Hendrik Kooikher who gave me time consuming and extremely detailed lessons on the historical wind design during the recent months. Mr. Kooikher is the leading organ acoustic engineer in Netherlands who is in charge of the current Zwolle restoration. We are now trying to simulate the original winding of the Zwolle organ to see what the possible result of the ongoing restoration process of the Zwolle instrument may be. You can visit the Zwolle web page to see and download (from the update page) the BETA release of the Zwolle sample set with the original wind routing (you have to own the Zwolle sample set to use this add-on). It must still be finished in some details but basically, it is spectacular what the difference in the sound it is.

Last weekend, I updated not only v3.0 to 3.1 but also from the Basic to the Advanced version of Hauptwerk. That the limitatons in the polyphony are gone, is nice, but the effects of the wind model are spectacular indeed!
Everybody who has Zwolle should try this ODF from Jiri's website.
For example; look and listen what happens if you, during playing, the blower stops...
(You shouldn't do this too often, because you have the organ loaded to play on it, not to swith in on and off and on and off... :lol: . But this is IMHO an example of the quality of the implementation of the windmodel in the Zwolle organ)

One remark: after installation of the package, you can not use your current ODF anymore because there will be an error message about sizes of bitmap-files in the blower-map. Probably Jiri can fix that?

(Europe is a great place to live: no windmodel limitations...;-) )

Anton Heger

BTW, the loading speed of compressed organs increases from 12.5 MB/s to about 50-60 MB/s. Great!

[zurek]

Indeed, I had to change the size of the bellows and blower images to make the new 12 bellows fit on the screen and so the earlier ODFs do not work with the present version of the sample set.
I will try to see what can be done about it, for now, the installation of the BETA version of the new ODF is at your own risk. If you need to reinstall the earlier version, you will have to deinstall the new ODF, deinstall the package no. 000378 and reinstall these two again from the original installation media.

[mdyde]

One remark: after installation of the package, you can not use your current ODF anymore because there will be an error message about sizes of bitmap-files in the blower-map. Probably Jiri can fix that?
In the meanwhile, you can backup folder 378 and restore it if you want to deinstall this ODF.

In Hauptwerk v3.10+ image files are cached in the sample set data caches to allow faster loading. If a sample set producer makes two separate organ definition files that have the same unique organ ID (a value the sample set producer assigns that Hauptwerk uses to determine which settings and caches relate to which organ definition(s)) then you will get an error if loading those two organ definitions one after the other because the cache contents for one would not be correct for the other. The sample set producer either needs to make sure that each organ definition has a distinct organ ID or you would need to use 'Organ | Load organ, adjusting rank audio output routing' to force the sample set cache to be regenerated the first time after switching from one organ definition to another that had the same organ ID.