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Views from the Choir Loft

Geeky Virtual Pipe Organ Options

Veronica Brandt · October 29, 2020

Earlier I wrote a little about using GrandOrgue to Make a Digital Piano Sound Like an Organ. This involved using my laptop as a virtual pipe organ. On the one hand, this provided a portable way to bring the sound of a pipe organ into the choir loft, which worked. The downside was that it took a while to set up and made it difficult to practise during the week, when I would use my laptop for other things.

Last year I found a smaller, older laptop to use as a virtual pipe organ, which could be left set up all the time at home. This involved using Aeolus, a smaller program which could run on a less powerful computer. Whereas GrandOrgue and Hauptwerk use samples recorded from real organs, Aeolus generates the sounds itself, combining different frequencies.

As the weather has been warming up here in Australia, I noticed the laptop’s fan coming on, which made me concerned that it would struggle with the heat if I left it on over the summer. I turned to the idea of using an even smaller computer—a Raspberry Pi!

It seems possible to run GrandOrgue on the Raspberry Pi and you can find a script to help you. But the Pi’s rather minimal resources would not be able to handle the more interesting sample sets available, so I was open to alternatives.

A company called Organnery, based in France, offers this demonstration of running a virtual pipe organ with Aeolus on a Raspberry Pi:

Organnery offers prebuilt kits or custom installations from qualified technicians, even adapting existing organs to become midified electronic organs.

For those who may be daunted at the prospect of setting up your own computer, Noel Jones has come up with a pre-packaged Choir Organ, a box which plugs into a midi keyboard and your sound system. I haven’t tried it, but it sounds like it uses similar ideas.

One more alternative is Zynthian – a company offering a very powerful multitimbral synthesizer and audio processor which can also run Aeolus. Like Organnery, it also uses a Raspberry Pi.

Lastly, I stumbled across Box of Stops, yet another Electronic Organ based on the humble Raspberry Pi. This one seems to use much more modern registrations, moving further from the classical pipe organ. The project takes the interesting approach to changing stops by utilizing the touch screen on a phone or tablet connected to the same local area network. This raises the interesting idea of a member of the congregation hacking into the system and changing the registration during a service from their phone.

Finally, here is a short tour of my own current setup. I have two USB MIDI keyboards, an amplifier, two large speakers, qwerty keyboard, monitor and mouse and a Raspberry Pi 3. I also have a pedalboard and bench gleaned from an old Lowrey Promenade. I haven’t connected the pedalboard yet, but this product makes it look possible.

 

I still take my laptop to Mass to bypass the Digital Piano in the choir loft. Having this set up at home has helped make it easier for me to practise as well as providing an accessible means for my children to try it out.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

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Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Pipe Organ, Raspberry Pi Last Updated: December 27, 2020

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About Veronica Brandt

Veronica Brandt holds a Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering. She lives near Sydney, Australia, with her husband and six children.—(Read full biography).

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Quick Thoughts

19 May 2022 • “Trochee Trouble”

I’m still trying to decide how to visually present the “pure” Editio Vaticana scores, using what is (technically) the official rhythm of the Church. You can download my latest attempt, for this coming Sunday. Notice the “trochee trouble” as well as the old issue of neumes before the quilisma.

—Jeff Ostrowski
16 May 2022 • Harmonized Chant?

This year’s upcoming Sacred Music Symposium will demonstrate several ways to sing the CREDO at Mass. This is because—for many parishes—to sing a full-length polyphonic CREDO by Victoria or Palestrina is out of the question. Therefore, we show options that are halfway between plainsong and polyphony. You can hear my choir rehearsing a section that sounds like harmonized plainsong.

—Jeff Ostrowski
14 May 2022 • “Pure” Vatican Edition

As readers know, my choir has been singing from the “pure” Editio Vaticana. That is to say, the official rhythm which—technically—is the only rhythm allowed by the Church. I haven’t figured out how I want the scores to look, so in the meantime we’ve been using temporary scores that look like this. Stay tuned!

—Jeff Ostrowski

Random Quote

Soloists are dangerous in any church choir! Their voices frequently do not blend with those of the other singers to form a rich, integrated tone.

— Roger Wagner

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