Hello David,
at first, untill now i don't have experience in sampling organs. I will start this night for my first sampling session. (already got permission and keys from parish). But i have made some thoughts about the session....
Martin Dyde has made remarks in recording organs and placement of microphones in his document:
Hauptwerk Version 1 Creating Organs Manual:
http://www.crumhorn-labs.com/Documentat ... Organs.zip. This points remain true for HW2.
1. Microphones, pricing and type:
As with all things, you can spend as much money as you want for microphones. I think, the correlation between fidelity and cost is exponentiell. Working with cheap microphones may be a waste of time. I am using AKG C3000B Single Cardioid Large Diaphragm Microphone, and am very satisfied with them. They are MUCH better than the dynamic microphones i used before. You get them for around 300$ each. But they need phantom power, which my recorder supplies.
Some weeks ago, one of my mics had to go to repair, and i asked my dealer for the cost of lending a mic. He wanted around 10 € per mic and weekend.
2. Placement:
This is matter of the goal of your sampleset. If you want it for recording music, the mics must be placed where they would be placed for the real recording of a concert. If you want the samples for life playing, i would place the mics near the organ console, so that you have the sound like sitting at that console. If you want dry samples, you have to place the mic rather near to the pipe mouth...
I think, the environmental noise will be the largest problem for the recording. The normally silent church changes to a noisy place, if you want to do some recordings. Suddenly, you hear the bird on the tree near the church, singing, an airplane crossing the sky, some people talking in front of the church, the wind pressing against some weak windows and so on. So i too will take the night for my first sampling session. And i think, the better the first recordings are, the less problems we will have later in processing the samples.
Good luck for you - Martin Dümig