Can anyone recommend me a good free church organ?
Samplephonics has a 3.2GB one but that seems a little excessive; I'm not looking for a 100% realistic emulation complete with all features but rather something for blending with an orchestra to get that gothic sound. I don't really know a whole lot about church organs so I could use some suggestions.
Bigcat? Samulis?
VCSL has a couple of organs.
There's a church organ in VSCO 2? Wow, now I feel silly. Thanks guys!
I remember a Japanese website with three VSTs on it for free and one of them was a customizable physical modelling organ. I should've bookmarked it at the time, and now I can't remember where it was or what it was called!
VSCO 2 and VCSL both incorporate church organ samples done by Simon Dalzell, a soft and (very) loud preset, with both manual and pedal notes sampled. VCSL also has a Renaissance-era continuo/portative organ, which has several stops separately sampled (4', 8', and 'full' are included in VCSL).
Thanks Sam, I searched my samples dir for both "church" and "organ" and it didn't turn up anything from VSCO 2, so I assumed it didn't have one. I completely forgot I moved VSCO 2 over to a different drive when I was having trouble with Kontakt Player... xD
(06-29-2019, 05:44 AM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks Sam, I searched my samples dir for both "church" and "organ" and it didn't turn up anything from VSCO 2, so I assumed it didn't have one. I completely forgot I moved VSCO 2 over to a different drive when I was having trouble with Kontakt Player... xD
The Pro Edition version also has the dampers in front of the pipes modulated by modwheel- so if you find it lacking, just push the modwheel forward.
(it sounds a bit like a filter, but that's not actually the case- Simon really sampled the organ with the damper both open and closed!)
(06-29-2019, 08:15 AM)Samulis Wrote: [ -> ]The Pro Edition version also has the dampers in front of the pipes modulated by modwheel- so if you find it lacking, just push the modwheel forward.
(it sounds a bit like a filter, but that's not actually the case- Simon really sampled the organ with the damper both open and closed!)
That's very nice, and exactly what I was looking for. Like I said I hardly know anything about church organs, so out of curiosity how does that work? I mean, exactly how are these dampers controlled on the real thing? As it's mapped to mod wheel I'm assuming it's some sort of linear control rather than an on/off thing like on a piano. Church organs appear to be an entire science onto itself.
This is a great video showing the construction and function of theater organs, 'kissing cousins' to church organs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PygQbt2ios
The dampers/swells are large wooden slats or other baffles sitting between the organ's pipes and the hall itself. They can be opened and closed by a control to allow sound out at variable dynamic level. (discussed at 4:10 and 15:34 in the video)
I like to think of organs, in particular theater organs, as 'acoustic synthesizers'. Sets of pipes were designed to approximate the timbre of certain instruments, with the same concepts of blending and orchestration as we think of with acoustic instruments.