Salisbury Willis Vol II?

2 wishes for the vol. 3:

1) It would be nice if the pedal board had 32 notes. If the stops of the pedal are not extended, at least the possibility to reach the 2 last notes with the couplers could be a consolation. Lavender wrote me that an upgrade will be ready during the Spring 2012 for Hereford in full compass 32/61. Of course, there are also organists who like orchestral transcriptions, Dupre, etc. Salibury is particularly excellent for this music.

2) An expressive Choir...

I'd echo the 32 note pedal compass for completeness, though I'm not sold on the idea of an expressive Choir, the real thing doesn't and not many organs have three expression pedals (and of those that do often the third is a general crescendo, in which case I'd needed to have built four into my console.) I'm kind of missing an expressive Choir reed but mindful that when v2 comes out, I will be able to couple the Solo Clarinet to the choir most of the time if I wanted to.

I do have a question about v2 however - could either the playback volume either be upped a bit, or the slider extended a bit in either direction (or is that an enhancement request for Hauptwerk itself?) I'm actually finding, when I switch from say Caen to Salisbury at the moment, that my Caen is on HW 0 volume and Salisbury can be on HW 100 (ie max) and I still need to up the master soundcard volume levels for Salisbury, or turn them down for Caen. It seems that the two instruments have been recorded at very different levels, and the slider within Hauptwerk doesn't change the volume enough for a loud sample to be quiet enough or a soft sample to be made loud enough for the slider alone to be sufficient (though in both cases I've left the "trim" untouhced as I couldn't figure out quite what it did). I wonder if anyone else has felt that way?

[mdyde]

Hello Organorak,

I do have a question about v2 however - could either the playback volume either be upped a bit, or the slider extended a bit in either direction (or is that an enhancement request for Hauptwerk itself?) I'm actually finding, when I switch from say Caen to Salisbury at the moment, that my Caen is on HW 0 volume and Salisbury can be on HW 100 (ie max) and I still need to up the master soundcard volume levels for Salisbury, or turn them down for Caen. It seems that the two instruments have been recorded at very different levels, and the slider within Hauptwerk doesn't change the volume enough for a loud sample to be quiet enough or a soft sample to be made loud enough for the slider alone to be sufficient (though in both cases I've left the "trim" untouhced as I couldn't figure out quite what it did). I wonder if anyone else has felt that way?

I think you might perhaps be missing how the audio output level controls are supposed to be used.

Here are some topics on that:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8964#p64811
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8964

The Hauptwerk output level setting is a per-organ setting, so you can just adjust it optimally for each organ:

Adjust it so that it's as high as possible when playing full organ, but without the 'audio' meter ever going into the red (otherwise you will get nasty distortion).

The intention is that you set the 'trim' to the maximum possible without clipping (red on the meter) occurring on full organ, when the level slider/fader is set to 100%.

You would then normally leave the level slider/fader (which can be connected to a MIDI expression pedal or knob) at 100% and only adjust it if you want to reduce the output level *temporarily*.

You would set the trim control properly once (for each organ) and then you shouldn't need to adjust it subsequently.

Think of the 'trim' and 'level' controls as analogous to the 'gain' and 'fader' controls you would find on a standard mixing desk.

See also the Performance tuning: Setting the audio output level' section in the user guide (pages 282-283 in the v4.0.0 guide) and 'The Audio, MIDI and Performance large control panel' (page 127), which covers the audio level settings and how to use them.

In summary, the intention is that you balance/adjust the levels for each of your sample sets using the 'Trim dB' setting, *not* the volume slider (which is meant for temporarily reducing the volume in real-time only (e.g. as a volume pedal, and should normally be left at 100%).

The Trim dB setting is there specifically for the purpose of balancing the levels of different sample sets.

Hope that helps.

[B. Milan]

2 wishes for the vol. 3:

1) It would be nice if the pedal board had 32 notes. If the stops of the pedal are not extended, at least the possibility to reach the 2 last notes with the couplers could be a consolation. Lavender wrote me that an upgrade will be ready during the Spring 2012 for Hereford in full compass 32/61. Of course, there are also organists who like orchestral transcriptions, Dupre, etc. Salibury is particularly excellent for this music.

2) An expressive Choir...

Hello ludu,

At this time we aren't planning on additional pedal notes (sorry), perhaps we'll have a look at this for a future update. Also we do not plan on enclosing the Choir. That division is fairly quiet already, enclosing it would almost certainly make it vanish into thin air. Perhaps we can experiment later to see how it might sound and if agreeable can issue an update, however in order to met our deadline for a December release we are not adding any additional extras that are not part of the original organ.

Thank you.

Brett,

Will the forthcoming volumes of Salisbury be available in surround at release or will that come later?

John

[B. Milan]

Hello John,

No, it will be a continuation of the current edition of volume 1.

Any news on a release date on Vols 2 and 3?

Simon

[B. Milan]

Hello Simon,

As I've written above in a few posts we are planning on having the remaining volumes of Salisbury ready in December. A specific date hasn't been decided yet as we are still finishing work on the instrument.

Thank you,

[B. Milan]

Hello,

I'm pleased to present a handful of demos for Salisbury volume 3, the complete organ!

We will have volumes 2 and 3 available for purchase in a few days from now, at that time I will also post memory requirements. We currently have volume 3 loading in under 16 GB using 24-bit lossless compression. Further memory options will be posted as well.

Many thanks to Daniel Cook for making these excellent recordings for us, I hope you enjoy them as much as we do and that it was worth the wait.

Here we are:

Franck Chorale No. 2

Cocker Tuba Tune

Cook Improv 1

Cook Improv 2

We'll have more demos and information coming soon, stay tuned...

This is very exciting Brett. Wonderful news and a fantastic xmas present.

I wish we could pre-order because I'm away come this Friday.

WOW !!!!!! Amazing sounds in Improv 2

[B. Milan]

WOW !!!!!! Amazing sounds in Improv 2

Yes, it's quite magical!

I specifically requested for Daniel to record something that features the Solo stops together with tremulant since they are such a wonderful sound with the sampled tremulant ranks (the entire Solo division was sampled with and without tremulant). It is almost a "theatre organesque" type sound which shows how versatile the Willis is as an orchestral instrument.

Glad you like it!

[B. Milan]

Here are the new screen displays included with volumes 2 and 3. Stops not available in volume 2 will simply have blank draw knobs similar to those in volume 1.

Note that we've created the portrait left and right stop jamb displays in high resolution for a 16:9 screen ratio at 1920x1080 pixels, these are meant for those users who have vertically orientated wide screen monitors, the stops are life sized when used this way. They duplicate the original organ console exactly with the long columns of knobs. Of course they can also be used on a normal monitor layout but Hauptwerk will scale the size down to fit, they are best used with your monitor orientation changed to portrait.

We've also included the usual left and right displays for landscape mode. We plan to also offer another set of display pages as an update shortly after the New Year which will include all couplers as stop knobs (not the current rocker style) and remove the pistons and foot levers so that only stops and couplers will be available. This will be made to fit a standard 4:3 layout.

Click on each image for a larger view.

Sounds great, Brett, well done. And now of course, Daniel doesn't have to pine for that wonderful instrument now he's moving (moved?) to the far reaches of Wales.