I have a registration question arising from the last few bars of Harris’s arrangement of Nimrod. The volume moves from fortissimo down to pianissimo in the space of two or three bars (then a diminuendo with a swell pedal).
I’m playing it on St Mary Redcliffe; that organ does not have a crescendo pedal so I’m using HW’s built in crescendo.
I’ve managed all prior stop changes in the piece with stepper pistons. But in the last few bars, too many changes need to occur in order to have a smooth reduction of volume from more or less full organ down to the quietest strings (on the Echo division, coupled down to the Great).
My hope had been that I’d be able to (i) move the crescendo to maximum volume at the appropriate time, then (ii) hit a stepper piston that would remove all stepper set stops so that the crescendo pedal could then do a rapid but smooth diminuendo down to the end. But I tested this idea and discovered, perhaps not surprisingly, that when I activated the stepper piston set to remove all stops except for the super quiet Echo strings, it killed all the stops activated by the crescendo pedal.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
Registration and Crescendo Question
Re: Registration and Crescendo Question
Right, the Hauptwerk master crescendo doesn't assert the stops of its current stage against piston changes, unlike real crescendo pedals where the stage's registration persists even after a general cancel. It's just the way it works -- it only has an effect at the moment you move the pedal to trigger a new stage.
Could you program a cresc B, C, or D to control the whole piece with an underlying soft string registration for the ending? I don't think there are any real rules limiting registrations for a transcription, so maybe you could make the whole thing work as cresc stages over a ppp base.
I might understand why the crescendo doesn't assert its state over other stop changes, but I'm sure Martin will let us know if I'm wrong. I think HW is mostly event-driven, passing along triggered events to the sampleset to carry out internal actions in response. I doubt that HW keeps its own stop states outside of the sampleset, and possibly doesn't have visibility into the sampleset's states, so it doesn't really know what the sampleset has turned on or off in response to events. Doing that might require updates to some samplesets to expose their internal states, which could be a problem with some producers retired. Just a guess...
Could you program a cresc B, C, or D to control the whole piece with an underlying soft string registration for the ending? I don't think there are any real rules limiting registrations for a transcription, so maybe you could make the whole thing work as cresc stages over a ppp base.
I might understand why the crescendo doesn't assert its state over other stop changes, but I'm sure Martin will let us know if I'm wrong. I think HW is mostly event-driven, passing along triggered events to the sampleset to carry out internal actions in response. I doubt that HW keeps its own stop states outside of the sampleset, and possibly doesn't have visibility into the sampleset's states, so it doesn't really know what the sampleset has turned on or off in response to events. Doing that might require updates to some samplesets to expose their internal states, which could be a problem with some producers retired. Just a guess...
Re: Registration and Crescendo Question
Hi @mnailor, thank you for your comments. I thought about using a crescendo pedal throughout the piece but I'm not confident that I'd get specific stop changes precisely where I want them to happen.
I've had a look at threads from several years ago about master volume control of the entire organ (linking the volume slider to an expression pedal). At that time it seems this approach did not work well for various technical reasons. So I wondered about creating a custom organ definition with the entire organ enclosed.
But then I thought the easiest thing would be first to test linking one of my two expression pedals to the master volume control slider. To my considerable surprise it worked; or at least it does what I wanted it to do. So for the immediate future I'm inserting a couple of additional stepper steps in the final bars, coupled with my newly created master volume control pedal.
I've had a look at threads from several years ago about master volume control of the entire organ (linking the volume slider to an expression pedal). At that time it seems this approach did not work well for various technical reasons. So I wondered about creating a custom organ definition with the entire organ enclosed.
But then I thought the easiest thing would be first to test linking one of my two expression pedals to the master volume control slider. To my considerable surprise it worked; or at least it does what I wanted it to do. So for the immediate future I'm inserting a couple of additional stepper steps in the final bars, coupled with my newly created master volume control pedal.
Bruce