Memory Levels

Hello,

Many organ manufacturers (both pipe and digital) design their organs with multiple levels of memory. This is useful as the main organist may store all of his combinations in Memory 1, but a visiting organist performing a concert may use Memory 5-10 to avoid changing the house organist's settings.

It's my understanding that Hauptwerk 7 has no equivalent of this very common feature, and that one could technically use the stepper functions to do this, but it's not nearly as intuitive.

I was wondering if Hauptwerk 8 made any changes to this or offered this function, and if not, if somebody could explain how one could get that equivalent of memory levels using Hauptwerk.

Thank you!

[mdyde]

Hello Scott,

The intention is that you would use different combination sets for that purpose. For example, you might set up 'favorite combination set 1' for one organist, and 'favorite combination set 2' for another. You can select and load favourite combination sets from MIDI pistons if you wish.

Hauptwerk v8 is the same as v7 in that regard.

The stepper does allow a partial implementation of memory levels -- as one way to set it up -- but it's limited to "general" (whole organ) combinations.

Combination sets, as Martin pointed to, are fully equivalent to memory levels, including the organist's registrations saved on Hauptwerk master generals, stepper frames, divisional/scoped pistons, reversibles, and the master crescendo.

I think most samplesets that have their own internal pistons and crescendo (in addition to HW's registration tools) probably also save those in combination sets, but I'm not certain if that's optional for the sampleset producer. EDIT: The user guide says these are saved in combination sets, too.

It can be helpful in this to use the same physical piston scheme across all samplesets, by using MIDI autodetect "for all organs" to set up master generals, reversibles, stepper pistons, and scoped (divisional etc.) pistons on the same console buttons for every sampleset, which you only have to assign once. Otherwise it can get very confusing for visiting organists when the pistons might trigger different functions on different samplesets. You can use reversibles for couplers, too.