Hauptwerk Virtual Pipe Organ

Perhaps some had missed this duet from last year featuring the Paramount 341 T/O sample set.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIk1elcRgaU

Very artistic in both the music and video produktion. Thanks to Drew and Sarah.

Rgds,
Ed

Thrilled to announce that Greenwood United Methodist Church and it’s Hauptwerk Virtual Pipe Organ will be featured in an upcoming episode of Journey Indiana on PBS. Music provided by organist James Richardson (aka “Romanos” here on the forums), as well as a special sneak peek of my lovely Sarah Sabatino and I playing our setting of Rhapsody in Blue for piano and theater organ. More details to come.

Hurrah on both accounts.

Rgds,
Ed

It was a very enjoyable visit, I must say! It’s truly impressive what Drew has accomplished.

The organ was featured in this weeks episode of Journey Indiana.

https://indianapublicmedia.org/journeyindiana/episode-320.php

Special thanks to James Richardson for stopping by to play. It was a thrill to hear the organ in the hands of someone who can get so much out of it.

Be sure to stay tuned for the credits reel.....

LIKE IT BIG TIME. So glad to see these "Great" efforts being recognized. Many of us have "witnessed" so much of the background of Opus I, in a word - Good Job! Congrats

Question - when do we get to experience your's and Sarah's complete rhapsody?

Rgds,
Ed

Over the last few days, the Hauptwerk organ at Greenwood United Methodist Church has been getting updated to v6, as well as undergoing all of the new updates from various sample set producers - most strikingly at the moment is the Caen Cavaille-Coll from Sonus Paradisi. The new pipe coupling and other improvements are astounding!

I am planning (but can’t promise) to make some demo recordings trying out and comparing different audio routing setups. Having 56 channels makes for an incredible amount of flexibility, but is also quite time-consuming. Namely, I want to do a side by side comparison of two different audio configurations I have long been toying with, but never implemented because Version 4 (which I had been running up until yesterday) did not make changing audio routing easy. I want to tryout the current arrangement (which used 6 groups of 8 channels each for the mains, primarily using the Cyclic algorithm), and compare it to a configuration which uses 12 groups of 4 speakers each using Tone Matching Mode 1. Then, I’d also like to do a THIRD one using the first setup, but use the rank offset feature to shift “duplicated” ranks up a speaker or two and see how that works.

I had long-feared that, when I made the hop to v6, I’d spend WAAAAAAAY too much time tinkering.

I have to be careful, though, as I still have to have something ready to play on Sunday morning.

For those curious to know, the upgrade process from 4 to 6 was a piece of cake. I had a small panic attack at one point because I realized I had forgotten to make a backup of v4 before installing 6, but luckily there was an automatic backup done just a day or two prior.

It’s so great that all of the voicing and tedious work done up to this point was kept in tact, especially and most concerning to me was the voicing done by Justin Nimmo and Tim Duckworth. It has all carried over and now we continue to move onward and upward.

Thanks, Drew, Excellent.

For good measure, Hauptwerk actually does a settings backup automatically anyway whenever you first launch a new version, but one can never have enough backups!

Drew;

Make sure to experiment with the MIDI Note # offset.

I had ignored it until recently and was very surprised and pleased with the increased detail and realism.

I have 6 stereo pair for each keyboard and previous to this change, with any amount of stops in a given division drawn, all sound came from a single pair if I pressed one key. Now, for example, with the 6 lowest pitched stops drawn pressing a single key has all 12 speakers producing sound. Big difference.

There might be a caveat to when to use the note offset. Using the default algorithm, the rank id number is used as an offset when several ranks play from the same note. That was good enough to spread one note across speaker pairs for a lot of samplesets.

But I've found that recent 6 or 8 perspective surround samplesets from SP have their rank ids sorted so all the perspectives of one rank are sequential by rank number, so the first perspective of the next rank has the same rank id modulo 6 or 8, and lands on the same speakers if your group is congruent to that size. Not picking on SP -- that's just where I noticed this.

In these cases, adjusting the note offset is needed. In other cases, it may actually defeat the goal of spreading one note across stereo pairs. I look at the audio interface's sound level meters to decide whether to do it.

Hello Mark/Drew,

You probably know this anyway, but just in case:

If you select one of the '... ranks constant' algorithms, the organ definition's RankIDs (as assigned by the sample set producer) aren't used. Hence if adjusting the algorithm note offsets, it would normally be preferable (for simplicity anyway) to use one of those '... ranks constant' algorithms, so that the sample set producer-assigned RankIDs don't confuse the picture.

At this moment, I have a side by side recordings (same MIDI file playing on the SP Casavant) and I cannot hear much of a difference. Maybe with this many channels, the same result is being achieved with both setups. One does have a bit more bass than the other; but that has me questioning whether I have something routed weird to the subs - but has no effect in the rest of the routing. I’ll experiment more over the coming days hopefully.

Basically, setup one is:

Setup 1:
6 groups, 8 channels each. Cyclic…. Ranks constant. The groups break out as Pedal/Great Flues, Pedal/Great Reeds, Choir Flues, Choir Reeds (Mixtures/Celestes), swell Flues, Swell Reeds (Mixtures/Celestes)

Setup 2:
12 groups of 4, Tone Matching Mode 1 - basically broke out all the Reeds, Flutes, Strings within their own division. (ie - Swell Flutes, Swell Principals, Swell Reeds, Choir Flutes, Swell Principals…..)

Thanks, Martin. So use a ranks constant algorithm with note offsets *or* ranks cycled. Makes sense. I hadn't thought to try it, but that avoids trying to figure out the rank id pattern on each sampleset.

Thanks, Mark. Yes -- it keeps things simpler that way.

Martin (and others), could you confirm or deny a few assumptions I'm making?

The new "Mixer Preset" feature is extremely valuable, BUT it does not really allow for switching audio routing quickly within the same sample set because you would still have to go through the rank routing process. It is, instead, meant to be sort of a "This Preset 1 works well for organs using this routing scheme," and "Preset 2 works well for organs using this other routing scheme." (ie. Preset 1 for example could be a scheme that works well for 3 manual classical organs, while Preset 2 is a scheme that works well for a 2 manual theater organ.... etc. etc.) The point of the Presets is to allow you to have a routing scheme assigned to each organ that makes the most sense for that organ. But it is NOT affording you the ability to quickly switch routing configs "on the fly" within the same organ. This is all fine by me. I just want to be clear on that.

So....

What that means, then, is that in order to do a true side-by-side comparison of two audio routing configurations, we are still going to have to make use of the Alternate Configurations, correct?

Let's take this real-world example.

I'm going to use the Sonus Paradisi Casavant as my guinea pig. I have my Default Configuration setup right now exactly like it had been setup in v4 prior to updating to VI. (I restored from a backup.)

If I wanted to compare that routing scheme against something totally different, the most efficient way of doing that would be to do a custom restore and take the Default Configuration and import it into Alternate Config 1 and only import the organ-specific settings (since that would retain voicing et al), and then change the audio routing scheme for that configuration. Am I correct in assuming that this, then, would create two totally separate routing schemes, using the exact same voicing?

This would then allow me to play the same MIDI file on each configuration. Ensuring that the ONLY difference between the two is speaker routing?

Is that all entirely accurate? Or did I miss something?