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qui animum adsergunt.
I
have been dreaming about building or renovating a classical pipe organ for
many years. When I was a teenager, my father and I would think of ways to
obtain, store and rebuild a small instrument for the pleasure, to learn, and
eventually to play. Back then (that was over 25 years ago), I went as far a
building a single wooden pipe (a 2 foot " bourdon"). The sound
was rough and crude, but it did play! And loud! My wind source was based on
an old vacuum cleaner. I quickly realized that it would be pretty much
impossible for me to build a complete instrument, even a small one, from
scratch. Our
discussions would usually end on the space required to achieve such a project
and of course on the money required to carry it out. This
dream was thus always pushed away in the "probably not achievable"
part of our minds. Probably not achievable until recently... A
friend of the family introduced us to the Hauptwerk
software. A
quick demonstration and many hours reading about this software convinced me
that my project was now feasible. It wouldn't be the tons of wood and tin
machine I always thought about, but may just be the next best thing. I
decided to find an old pipe organ console, renovate it, convert it to have a This
web site is therefore the documentation of this project, in the hope that the
information may help others which might have the similar crazy idea of
playing a pipe organ at home, and will hopefully help promote the great
musical instrument that a pipe organ is. There
are many references already on Hauptwerk on the web (your favorite search
engine will yield many results), but there are few on the details of setting
up the console. This is where I intend to do most documentation. Although
the project is fairly complete, I find there is always another little thing
to improve. If you start such a project of your own, take your time, do it in
little manageable steps. It is great fun, it is not really complicated, but
it is a long project. I also have a regular demanding job. But I was able to
acheive a very pleasant and very playable instrument in about 2 years,
working a couple hours here and there. It is hard to estimate the amount of
time in total. I redid most of the wood work and rebuilt the entire
electronics. You now know why my web page logo is a fermata. Un
petit mot aux lecteurs francophones. Vous comprendrez que j'ai écrit ces
pages en anglais pour rejoindre un maximum de lecteurs, mais je serai heureux
de répondre à vos questions en français. |
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Copyright © 2011 Jeff Gagnon. All rights reserved.
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