I'm particularly pleased to see this week's release of the English Romantic sets from Charles Braund's Silver Octopus Studios. After auditioning most of the dry sets available today, either in person or on ContreBombarde, I'm pleased to announce that the Silver Octopus Romantic-100 set will form the heart of my 8500-watt, 44-channel, permanent public HW installation.
Charles is a modest guy, so let me expound upon why anyone working on a permanent install in a live space, or who has reverb hardware, or who is looking forward to built-in reverb in HW 4.1, should give these Romantic samples serious consideration.
- Most HW sets, wet or dry, are static documents of individual instruments. This is absolutely valid and interesting, and it has served the HW community well. But every instrument has its strengths and weaknesses, and I wouldn't want to invest as much of myself as I have to end up with many of the latter. (Witness the "extensions" added to many sets to fill in various holes.) By contrast, Charles has cherry-picked some of the best stops from period Father Willis and similar instruments and used his considerable experience to assemble a coherent composite set with an extremely complete, well-balanced specification.
- The samples are 48-kHz, 24-bit. With the short tails of a dry set, quantization noise isn't a huge issue, but the quality is there. For example, listening to the SO Carillon with headphones, the bells decay all the way to zero over 20-30 seconds with no hint of noise at the end.
- All of the mixtures are separate ranks. The 64-stop has no fewer than 5 mixtures (!) ranging from 3-5 ranks each, and each rank is made up of individual samples. Mixtures sampled as a whole are challenging due to mistuned pipes, and if the mixture ranks aren't regulated well, there's no way to fix it. With separate ranks, one can voice the mixture components at will, route the ranks to different speaker groups, even change the composition of the mixture, etc.
- The celestes are separate ranks. The 64-stop has 2 lovely celestes, and it is well established that celestes are most effective if their ranks can be routed to separate speaker groups.
- Willis reeds. Several folks have commented on these reeds, for which Father Willis was revered. Like everything else, the reeds were recorded up close and contain all that wonderful fine detail needed to produce a convincing stop.
- Massed strings. The 80-stop adds a string chorus to the Solo division, for a total of 14 string/celeste ranks at 16/8/4-foot, and the 100-stop will add even more. I can't wait to hear all of those strings at once spread across 44 channels and a 50-foot span.
- The license is extremely liberal. Private or public use is fine. Recording performances: absolutely. Revoicing or alteration of the underlying samples is OK. CODM: no problem at all.
- Crucially, the samples are *unencrypted*. Unlike most commercial sample sets, Charles ships these as .wav files. This, plus the license, affords maximum flexibility in tailoring the samples as needed to fit a specific application.
- The price is more than fair, with a per-stop cost well below some of the "premium" sets out there. Considering the separate-rank mixtures and celestes, the per-rank cost is even more compelling. Upgrade costs are minimal as well.
- Charles doesn't hold back the high-value stops. For example, even the 32-stop set has a complete 16-foot Great chorus, the Tuba, the very nice Corno di Bassetto, and two 32-foot pedal stops.
- Charles can recommend a custom spec to fit a specific application.
I've been running a beta version of the 48-stop for the last few weeks, and I'm now getting the final 64-stop configured with excellent results so far. I need the 100-stop set plus HW 4.0, both expected fairly soon, before I can consider my instrument finished, but even with the 48, the organ feels immense. The same day I got the beta 48-stop going, I received comments like "I think everyone there tonight was in awe of it. It's turned out beatifully!"
In the fullness of time, we'll post recordings from this multi-channel installation. And I would gladly extend an invitation for any nearby Hauptwerkians to come play it yourself.
