Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Here it is! Opus 5 (or is it 6!). I'm very pleased how the console turned out. The whole thing can be assembled and broken-down in a matter of minutes. The monitor is mounted on a VESA arm.
The pedalboard caused some consternation! The Midi Gadgets mpc32xrs controller failed causing nasty cyphers. Luckily I have a spare.
The first outing for Opus 5 will be Tyntesfield Chapel this Sunday. There is no organ in the chapel. We are having to install our instrument in a corridor! There will be many pictures.
Future enhancements will include a 17" monitor and new bumper felts for the pedalboard.

Back to a favourite topic, audio. I've been experimenting loading wet sample sets in different ways.
My favourite sample sets are Haverhill OIC Extended and Willis 50 from Lavender Audio. Both sets are not very wet, merely moist! I feel that attempting to reproduce stereo in a reverbrant space is futile; it works very well in your living room but not in a church. Another aspect about stereo that disturbs me is the utilisation of speakers. One of the really cool features in Hauptewerk is pipe to speaker routing, you can configure the algorithm that makes best use of your speakers.
If your channel format is stereo, you need a stereo audio output group. So every pipe will be routed to a stereo pair.

For a normal size church, we use 4 powered speakers and a sub. 4 speakers would yield 2 stereo outputs. Using cycled routing with this configuration is silly. Better to manually route divisions and ranks. However loading the sample set in mono yields a few desirable side effects, it halves memory use and permits more effective cycled routing. 4 speakers now yield 4 outputs. Cycled routing now makes sense.

In conclusion, we now load moist sample sets in mono and truncate releases. This gives must better results in reverberant spaces.