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Overview of sample sets

Existing and forthcoming Hauptwerk instruments, recommendations, ...
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Ferry

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Overview of sample sets

PostFri May 06, 2022 12:30 pm

Hello everybody,

I am a quite new Hauptwerk User and discovered a lot of sample sets from different vendors. I made a basic overview, so its easier to compare sample sets or to find the right one. You can have a look at this Link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SCLLaSWOenXSlw2kfY9bHmNdWdnlash25Npw6nYyEEg/edit?usp=sharing

Maybe this is helpful for you too
Ferry
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larason2

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostFri May 06, 2022 8:05 pm

Very helpful, thanks for sharing this! That must have been a lot of work!
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Ferry

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostSat May 07, 2022 1:40 am

Yes it was, but I think it was worth it. I made it public, that more people can see it.
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sesquialtera

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostSat May 07, 2022 3:44 am

Impressive and very usefull work, thank you Ferry !
Keeping it up to date will take time too ...
A little picture of each organ would be great, but I guess it is not possible ! :wink:

It is possible to store organs by (i.e.) prices, or by Ram consumption ?
(I guess yes, but couldn't manage to do that ...)
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Andrea75

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostSat May 07, 2022 5:14 am

Very interesting work, thank you: if you wish you can complete it by adding the sets of my production, which you can find on this page.
Andrea Bonzi, Milan

http://www.andreabonzi.it
http://www.hauptwerk.andreabonzi.it


"... di lor non ragioniam, ma guarda e passa..." (Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia)
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lefranc22

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostSat May 07, 2022 10:49 am

You can add also the AVO sam)le sets;
https://hauptwerk-augustine.info/All_samples.php
and the Prospectum ones
https://www.prospectum.com/index.php?lang=en&id1=2&id2=0
also the "jeux d'orgues"
https://www.jeuxdorgues.com/fr/
and the Maltese Historic Pipe Organs
http://mhpo.epizy.com/?i=2
and several small editors as Sesquialetera VPO
https://www.samsleath.com/instruments
or the Jepisi harmoniums
https://www.jepisi.re/harmoniums/
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Ferry

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostSat May 07, 2022 3:34 pm

Hello everybody,

Thanks for your comments and feedback. I try to add the sample sets you mentioned in the next days.
I noticed, that when you select a column with a link in it, Google Docs will open a small context window with a preview of the site. This shows an image of the organ. It is still not perfect but quite nice to have.
When you right click at the letters A to L, you are able to sort the column. This is just a visual change and will not be saved.

Have a good day
Ferry
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JulianMoney-Kyrle

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostSat May 07, 2022 6:00 pm

You have clearly put in a lot of work and this is something that I am sure many people will find useful. I hope you don't mind if I make some suggestions if you feel inclined to update it at any point:

Many of the more recent sample sets have been recorded with multiple channels using different microphone positions. This is not only to enable surround-sound for those of us who have the space and the equipment, but also to enable the perspective to be varied, with some sample sets having a slider or presets to enable clost and distant perspectives, for instance, to be mixed on the fly. Knowing the number of channels, or whether there is a variable-perspective feature, is something that may influence some people's decisions.

Separately from variable perspective etc. is how the instrument sounds in its acoustic, including the reverberation time (though this is the same whether the microphones are close or distant) and whether it is recorded wet (i.e. with the acoustic of the building) or dry (i.e. purely the sound of the pipes). A dry sample set is unusable without some kind of reverberation added, and these are particularly well suited for use in a large building such as a church with its own acoustic. Some are available as either.

Also giving the release date of the sample set is helpful, as some of them are over 20 years old and recording and processing techniques have changed over this time. Also some sample set providers were still learning their craft with their earlier sets, though others were superb right from the beginning.

Some samples are only available in HW5 - 7 format due to the method of encryption used. Others are available for HW4 as well, and others are unencrypted, meaning they are compatible with all versions of Hauptwerk.

Excel has a feature whereby a table can be sorted according to different columns by clicking on the column heading. This is obviously more work to set up, and may require some changes in the descriptions in each column so that they sort in a sensible order. I don't know what software you have used to prepare your spreadsheet, however, and whether it has a similar function, or how easily it is accessed if so.

One area where I do think it would be worth going into more detail is your classification of the different types of organ. I am not sure what criteria you are using to distinguish between Romantic and Symphonic organs as I have tended to regard these labels as interchangeable (though I am sure that not everyone here would agree with me). However, you have grouped some instruments together which are fundamentally different in the way they are conceived and how they sound. For instance, Aristide Cavaille-Coll, who was single-handedly responsible for creating the French symphonic organ, had his own views on what an organ should be and how it should work, which is fairly consistent between the many instruments that he built in the second half of the nineteenth century, and which inspired a whole school of composers, such as Franck, Widor and Vierne. His organs are not at all like those of, for instance, Henry Willis, and where the French idea of a symphonic organ is that, like an orchestra, the choruses should work together and be capable of very effective crescendos and decrescendos, there was never any expectation that they should imitate orchestral instruments in the way that many English organs built at the same time tried to, in the tradition of Town Hall organists playing arrangements of orchestral music to a public who were unlikely to hear it any other way, which never existed in France. German Romantic organs are something else entirely, and many modern organs, such as the main Marcussen organ in Rotterdam, while they may be designed to be capable of playing a wide range of Romantic music, have a clarity of sound that makes them particularly suited to contrapunctal and Baroque music.

Of course every instrument is unique, but if I had to classify them I think I would include the following categories:
- Baroque organs of the North German / Dutch type as exemplified by Arp Schnitger and Gottfried Silbermann (I'm sure HW users in the Netherlands will tell us that Dutch instruments never sounded like German ones, but I have not had the opportunity to play either for real).
- Baroque organs of the Central German / Thuringian type as played by Bach and exemplified by Henry Trost and others.
- Modern organs sometimes described as Neo-Baroque, which include recent instruments inspired by the North European Baroque masters, and those built half a century ago when the Organ Reform Movement was in its heyday and which are now generally regarded as rather extreme and of their time.
- Modern organs specifically built to play Bach using the kinds of voicing and registers that he would have had available, with a wide variety of colours (including strings and different kinds of flutes) at 8' pitch, detuned celeste stops not found in North German Baroque organs and 32' labial stops to give the gravitas that Bach is though to have liked; examples for Hauptwerk are Velosovo and the Metzler organ at Poblet.
- English cathedral organs and other English organs by the likes of the Henry Willis Dynasty and William Hill.
- Early French organs, which had a fairly consistent stoplist from one instrument to another and voiced rather differently from other types of organ, and are quite specifically suited to playing French Baroque music; there are some recent organs conceived along the same lines, such as Dom Bedos.
- Cavaille-Coll organs.
- Later organs inspired by Cavaille-Coll and built primarily for playing Romantic French music.
- German Romantic (I don't know much about these).
- American Classic (I don't know much about these either; to my ears they don't sound as interesting as the many and varied European organs but I haven't really explored them).
- Modern concert hall organs, which have to be able to play a wide variety of music, hold their own against an orchestra and are usually in quite a different acoustic from church organs
- Historic organs of various types from Spain, Italy and elsewhere which probably shouldn't be lumped together as they are all quite individual.
- Various small instruments such as continuo organs and house organs, a few of which have been sampled for HW.
- Huge instruments which seem to exist purely to combine as many stops as possible, not always with any overall artistic integrity.

I have probably left out something else important, but I hope you get the idea.

If you haven't already seen it, you may be interested in this Web site, which carries a fairly comprehensive list of organs sampled for Hauptwerk and other systems:
https://www.pcorgan.com/SampleSetsEN.html

I have found it difficult to resist buying sample sets over the years and I now have over 60, including most of the free ones. There are some which I keep returning to over and over again, and others (mostly large instruments) which I hardly ever use and rather regret spending money on. The ones I enjoy the most tend to be small to medium organs which are really well recorded and sound natural, as well as being particularly suited to some sorts of music rather than trying to be everything at once. Unfortunately this isn't the sort of information that is very easy to find either from perusing the producers' web sites or from searching this forum.
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mnailor

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostSat May 07, 2022 7:07 pm

Good information. Very minor quibble: G. Silbermann's working territory was more Central Germany rather than Northern.
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JulianMoney-Kyrle

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostSun May 08, 2022 3:56 am

Mark,

Thank-you for pointing that out. Though of course his style of organ building was closer to Schnitger than to Trost.

I have been playing on the SP Freiberg sampleset over the last couple of days (mainly trying to learn Hindemith's second sonata, which suits it very well). I had forgotten just how lovely it is.
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Ferry

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Re: Overview of sample sets

PostWed May 18, 2022 11:37 pm

Thanks for your feedback. I updated the spreadsheet with more sample sets. The sample sets from Augustine`s are still in the works. There is also a short ReadMe to give you some further information.

Ferry

Overview
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1SCLLaSWOenXSlw2kfY9bHmNdWdnlash25Npw6nYyEEg

ReadMe
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D5S3c_kq0i5BRikYNa6fb8sexukQ8eM-U2VmaKnsQd8/edit
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bambergfranken

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Partially incorrect register information

PostThu May 19, 2022 2:18 am

My great praise for all the work, which is very helpful for all of us!

I have discovered another fundamental error in the table.
There are manufacturers like Milan, Inspired Acoustics or Lavender who sell their sets in pieces. However, the number of registers does not result from adding up all the individual parts. IA's Hill, for example, does not have 175 stops. Also the Hinsz or Willis from Milan do not have 120 or 141 stops. In other words, for all sets that consist of several parts, the register data in the table would have to be corrected.

Roman

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