Like Les, I was involved with the organ from an early age though we never had any organ in the house. I very much grew up as a teenager with pipe organs both church and cinema (I was “resident” organist on a Compton 3/8 cinema organ at 13) and played in our local church on both a broken down Estey two manual reed organ and a R&D Apollo. My website gives a bit more of my history but is mainly concerned with my pipe organ interests over the years rather than pipeless instruments.
After several years working for or being involved with companies as diverse as Nicholson’s, Kenneth Jones, Viscount, Conn, Copeman-Hart, Heyligers, Woop, Kienle, and Ahlborn, (I even spent three years with Kawai along with Les and his father though we can’t remember meeting), I eventually opened my own general music shop and recording studio.
Things were developing fast in the 80's and in 1981 Emu had produced their ground breaking Emulator sampler – very few could afford the Fairlight or the Synclavier and not many could afford the Emulator either.
I remember once asking Henk Heyligers why he hadn’t adopted sampling for his organs and he replied that he wouldn’t go along that path until he could get right into the very core of sampling hardware as it existed then. He remained in the analogue world until he retired but he was probably the world leader in that field – have a listen to the Piet van Egmond recordings in Apeldoorn at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ6VxtbURk4 they are quite remarkable even today. What he could have achieved with HW !
However, with the introduction of the Emu sampler especially when it eventually became more affordable and got beyond 8 bit, I became one of their retailers.
Finally, I was able to record my own pipe samples and edit them. Between the engineers at Emu and myself, we did plan a church organ based on multiple EIII units but sadly Emu were taken over by Creative Labs and their hardware samplers disappeared altogether so the project was shelved – I never really got on with Akai. Thus, I had to wait until Tascam produced their Gigastudio to be able to get back in the game again.
Like others now working with HW we saw Gigastudio as an ideal way to produce pipe organ sounds that we ourselves could create and produce without being ruled by one of the big manufacturers. However, we were all rather left in limbo when Tascam decided to discontinue Gigastudio.
An organist friend of mine mentioned Hauptwerk shortly after Martin had first introduced it so I looked into it and started experimenting to see what could be achieved. Martin came up to see me and we spent a pleasant afternoon and evening discussing HW. It was evident from our meeting that Hauptwerk was going to offer so much more than anyone else had done previously and it also wasn’t going to be discontinued at the whim of some large corporate body accountant.
I did look into J-Organ but was not over impressed and I felt that I would have been a traitor to jump onto the Grand Orgue and other platforms when they emerged. I therefore decided to put my future “eggs” into the one basket.
OK, I still don’t have the first inkling about programming (wrong generation and background plus the wrong sort of brain) but I do know a little bit about recording and a little bit about pipe organ sound plus I have sufficient nous to be able to use software to edit organ samples to get results that I feel are authentic. HW has developed beyond all the expectations I had of it two decades ago and with ever more powerful computers and memory capability, what was once impossible in terms of what can be done has become a complete reality.
I join with others in thanking the genius of Martin for giving people like myself access to a realm that was previously denied to all but a chosen few corporate boffins.