mnailor wrote:I think this is the best American organ sampleset yet. It has a warm, late Romantic sound and disposition, reminiscent of good E. M. Skinners without being identical. None of the later Aeolian-Skinner "neo-Baroque-like and who needs reeds on the Great or strings on the Positive?" stuff going on here.
Since this is somewhat dry auditorium, rebuilt smaller than the organ was designed for, I added a rear perspective in Rank voicing to all the Direct and Ambient ranks with releases truncated, and sent that to my rear speakers with some of the SP Caen rear-facing 6 meter IRs added.
With the bigger emulated room, it sounds closer to Girard than any other sampleset, and has similar tonal resources overall, even if individual stops don't sound the same.
The existing E. M. Skinner samplesets have always fallen short of the big ensemble I'd always hoped for. This one has it.
Nice job!
Thanks for the kind words, Mark!
Now that this project is coming to a close, I can say it was well worth the 5 years it took.... this is the finest romantic sampleset in our collection, and probably the best work we've done so far.
We have found a few more minor problems (which are corrected in the latest update), After playing this set for quite awhile, and on the recommendation of some people who know Skinner strings very well, we went back and re-did the noise reduction on all of the solo strings, the Direct version of the Swell strings, the Flauto Mirabilis and the Great Flute Harmonique. I felt like we maybe did just a bit too aggressive noise reduction on those stops, and so I wanted to revisit it. We're testing it now, and will release an entire new install once we are confident it is ready.
There are exciting days ahead for Evensong - we have some things in the pipeline that I hope will equal or exceed what we've done here - can't say more until the contracts are signed and the recording is in the can.