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Free Organ

organclearinghouse.com

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LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER has a great set of video about removing an organ from a home, and setting it up/modifying it in his place. I highly recommend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PwwRR8deHk

I deeply love this Youtube channel, and I have been following his organ saga for quite a while! The initial move/reinstallation was super enlightening to understand how organs actually work.

Yeah, that's great. In [1], you can see it (Joan's organ) in its original state. If you follow the youtube playlist, you can see the amount of work it took to get it out and install it. That organ has some 15 stops, many of which are "borrowed" (i.e., the 4" uses the same pipes as the 8", but plays an octave higher), and it doesn't have much wind pressure. So it is small. The organ from the link has 117 ranks, and its pipes extend far beyond Joan's organ, and it fills a hall instead of a small parish, so it is huge. Multiply the work done by Sam Battle (who's behind look mum no computer) by a factor ... 40?

[1] https://metro.co.uk/2021/03/09/house-with-full-organ-built-i...

Thanks for sharing, this just blew my mind.

Interesting, after fast forwarding through the follow-up videos it got less impressive. The way it was integrated into the house was jaw dropping.

I've been really enjoying this project!

It's worth noting that this project is installed in his museum of old technology called THIS MUSEUM IS NOT OBSOLETE [1]. Tickets are £5, and under 13’s are £3.

I've never been to Britain, so I can't attest to it, but it seems like a cool place if you like retro technology.

[1] https://this-museum-is-not-obsolete.com/

If the Large Hot Pipe Organ showed up on this website I'd have to fight the terrible compulsion to try and find a budget for it ...!

https://archive.org/details/iuma-large_hot_pipe_organ

"The Large Hot Pipe Organ is the world's only MIDI controlled, propane powered explosion organ. The LHPO's pyro-acoustic explodo-rhythmations will throbbatize your earholes and dance-ify your booty and make you realize what "Industrial Music" REALLY means!

"Performing live at contemporary art festivals throughout Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Holland, the LHPO is an experience of sound, light, heat, rhythm and fire you won't want to miss."

(At least it was, as of a couple of decades ago.)

When it has a walk-in airlock, you know you’ll need some space.

When it has a walk-in airlock, you know you have an AI alignment problem.

Just what do you think you're doing, Watson?

Wait, does Hans Zimmer use this for his percussion lines?

There’s even a term for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAAAM

There's another noise which is really just a low frequency sweep when sauron's ring is removed and he implodes at the beginning of LoTR- Fellowship of the Ring. (that beginning sequence is the best thing in the entire trilogy IMHO)

I was an extra in those scenes. One of the "prologue" elves.

The shot where all the orcs coming running into the elves and they spin their blades at the same? Shot in a carpark on the mountain because it had snowed the night before and would have ruined the scene.

Oh wow I 100% disagree with you (respectfully). I think the opening sequence of LotR with narration is super lazy storytelling. Narrative exposition is a great way to give a bunch of info quickly but it is the most boring way. It is just information download for the viewer.

More importantly it failed at, least for me, to establish what is and isn’t widely known about the world to the characters. Made me always wonder what took Gandalf so long to figure out that the ring Bilbo found was Sauron’s ring until I realized nobody is really meant to know it right away.

It would have been a lot more satisfying if the story was revealed slowly, with a major chunk of it discovered on screen through the conversation with Elrond.

Again, my opinion.

Haha I never realized gandalf wasn't supposed to know. I always thought he just thought it would be safe with Bilbo because sauron didn't know Bilbo had it so it gave gandalf time to plan what to do with it.

You are correct that the first rule of film making is show don't tell.

gandalf already suspects that bilbo has found something extremely important in the hobbit. In Fellowship he throws the ring into the fire merely to confirm what he already certainly knows.

Seeing a massive battle between multiple armies and having sauron show up with the ring is ... super lazy storytelling? Huh? It has nothing to do with Gandalf. Also, Gandalf doesn't know and he confirms it indirectly through research which is also shown in the movie....

I'm shocked this wasn't a burning man project

Somewhat unrelated, but I found the pricing page interesting: https://www.organclearinghouse.com/fees

> The cost of relocating, refurbishing, restoring, renovating a vintage organ is typically 2/3 or 3/4 that of commissioning a new organ.

A free organ (I suppose unsurprisingly) is very expensive.

And the finder's fee is $2500 O_O very much not free!

When the cost of moving/installing the organ exceeds a million, it kind of puts the fee into perspective and explains why they can rely on the honor system for a 2.5k charge.

That's about the cost of paying someone for 2-4 weeks of work. Seems about right for finding a new owner for an organ.

$2500 is chump change for the costs involved with something like this.

It's a major construction project as well, an organ this size is designed/built together with the hall that houses it and can't be easily fitted into a different location.

Actually playing the organ well is a hugely, hugely difficult skill -- you might think it's similar to a piano, but that neglects (a) the whole separate pedalboard for your feet; (b) the mental load of sometimes seeing up to eight-ish lines of music simultaneously across a series of different manuals (keyboards) with different voicings, that you have to control and change, whilst playing (±turning pages!); and finally (c) -- in piano music, you "play the notes" and if you hold the key down a little bit longer or shorter than is strictly indicated, it's not the end of the world and easily either becomes a form of articulation or a convenient way to change hand positions. In organ music, you have to "play the rests" – hold on each note exactly for as long as is required; no more, no less, and still get expression and tone in there, either with a swell box (≈volume knob for the feet) or, better, by your touch.

Here's a fairly extreme example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHLRgvNh6Lk (Bohemian Rhapsody on a ~33k pipe organ. He's got a bluetooth button for turning pages on an iPad; the rest of the tech could easily be victorian).

When I was little, my father often complained about the terrible organist performance in the church close to where my grandmother lived. It really didn't sound very good, the sounds blended together and it was too slow. But apparently good organists were hard to come by, so they had to keep him/her.

Of course the problem is not just the difficulty, it's also the fact that you can't just buy an organ and start training on your own. And with declining popularity of Christianity, there are fewer people who want to learn it in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if today many existing organs aren't played anymore because there is nobody who could do it. Especially in European countries, where religiosity has declined dramatically.

You also have to specifically like the organ. I grew up with an electric one in my home (two ranks and a pedal board) but spent all my time on the piano instead.

Kinda wish I had given it a better chance now. They are cool instruments and the experience would have been good as I have since fallen into synths, which play similarly.

The specific instrument will have a big impact too. Most organs around now (which is an unspecified period of time after when you’re speaking of) have two manuals, each of four octaves, one octave of straight pedal board, lacklustre voices and speakers, and issues of at least some form (e.g. a few notes that just don’t work any more). They’re just not particularly fun. But get one in good working order with three manuals, two of which have five octaves, and two octaves of properly curved pedal board, and power, and it’s altogether another matter: then, if you’re a child, your only difficulty will be that your legs aren’t long enough. It’ll be more enjoyable, and even a bit easier to play (though the difference in ease of playing won’t be as stark as between a poor upright piano and a good grand piano).

Feel free to AMA about this (organ building in general; I have nothing to do with the site specifically). Before I moved into tech I did a pipe organ building apprenticeship.

Why do you think they organ is free? I imagine because the cost of transport and lack of people who want that exact organ?

Every significant pipe organ is unique, and custom-built. You can modify and change it: e.g. add an extra rank, move the pipes around to make it fill the room better and so on, so even if two organs started the same, pretty soon they are different.

I did a handful of moves. It made sense when a church was moving to a new building, or some other "nearby" relationship, but for the most part it wasn't that much cheaper than buying one new. By the time you cushioned the pipes for transit and transported them somewhere else, you could have received an order from a factory for new pipes. The little tiny pipes are almost guaranteed to break or be deformed on a long move, and all the leather around the bellows will get torn.

The organ in the parent article is big. That's going to be a large job just moving it, and there aren't that many buyers for organs that big. (Because it will be expensive to maintain.) So they are looking for a major cathedral, a university's great hall, a big city town hall or something like that. All of which are going to struggle just to fund the work assembling the organ, let alone paying to buy it.

There was a requirement that the organ be kept together, which is why it is valueless. If they didn't mind someone buying it to fill up a spare parts supply, they could probably get some money for it.

What's the thing that breaks the most in organs?

When the musician presses a key on the console, there are three possible technologies for turning that key press into air going into the pipe.

1. It could be an electric signal, in which case the most common thing to fail in the organ is the relay that opens and closes the valve.

2. It could be a pneumatic signal: the keypress opens a valve to let air through to a tiny tube which opens the valve on the music pipe. This was surprisingly reliable, but I'm slightly biased because a few decades before my apprenticeship, a slightly idiosyncratic pipe organ builder had been operating in the area, and he was a passionate believer in the goodness of pneumatics over all other technologies, so over his career he got very, very good at making reliable pneumatics. On those organs, it tended to be the tubing that would split.

3. Fully mechanical: you press the key to open the valve to let air into the pipe. The most stops you have open, the harder you have to press the keys. These tended to be much older instruments, so I saw a lot of holes in the bellows material.

---

Other surprisingly common failure: birds and mice falling into the big pipes. Then they can't get out, and die in there. It gave a strange muted sound to that one note.

Did you do any builds for homes or studios? Or was it all churches?

Mostly churches. A few universities where there was a conservatorium of music had some smaller organs.

The company I worked with didn't install into anyone's home, but one of our competitors did once.

At first I thought "Free Organ" here meant human organ and was excited to see something in the field of free (and fair) human organ transplant.

Nothing against the post though.

Late last year, I acquired a Kawai DX1900, which had been bought new for $6,000 (I think they made it in the 1970s and maybe the earlier 1980s), for $100. (This is AUD; in today’s money, that was probably an initial purchase price of around $20,000–50,000.) My acoustic piano has been feeling rather neglected since: I’ve been playing the organ much more. It’s interesting to experiment with just how different organs and pianos are as instruments. It’s also fun seeing the quirks and failure modes of analogue electronics—things are much more likely to keep working, just a little less well, whereas in digital electronics things largely work perfectly or not at all. The top manual is supposed to be mildly pressure-sensitive in ways that tweak the synthesiser mode (e.g. press hard for vibrato), but this doesn’t appear to work any more, and the lowest note goes haywire with the frequency it emits (but only in synthesiser mode, not in percussion mode which doesn’t use the pressure-sensitivity). Also switches that you’d expect to have two positions actually turn out to have a third unintended one when they’re between the two positions, when it’s turned off one behaviour but not turned on the other, or has turned on both. All up the organ is 144kg (plus another 16kg for the stool and 26kg for the pedal board). Analogue electronics and solid construction and very powerful speakers (in the room I use it, I keep the master volume around 30%, and even at that point it’s capable of being oppressively loud) and a Leslie speaker and such ain’t light.

Pity pipe organs take so much space. I’d like one or two.

I think you'd enjoy this two-parter:

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-gx1-synthesizer-...

Good fun. I found mine on Gumtree, where I’ve looked on occasion to see if there are any interesting organs. This was the first time I found one that wasn’t junk or more expensive than I was willing to pay. Had to remove two sets of sliding doors to get it into my house (had to to get the piano in, too), but well worth the effort. Seven plastic knobs on sliders came off en route, because the fork prongs they clip onto are somehow bent inwards. Other than that, all it took was borrowing my parents’ car, trailer and piano trolley, and a family member or two at each end to help. A much easier story for a somewhat lighter and smaller but still rather big and heavy instrument!

- "The organ is immense: 117 ranks, including three full-length 32' voices..."

Hmm, how tall is this ceiling right here... umm... maybe I can bend them just a little idk

edit: Oh, I know: I can just stick them out the window and out past the neighbors' windows above. There is no flaw in this plan

You actually can bend organ pipes (called "mitering"), and they will still work.

Photo showing this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herschbach_%26_Girod...

You can even have multiple bends to snake it up and down.

Awesome! Now I only need to find a sensible use for a giant pipe organ at home.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html

The art of computer programming is not Donald Knuth's only art to master...

Actually vol. 4b of TAOCP has a (combinatorial) exercise about the possible configuration settings of DK's private organ; I think I saw it near page 300 or so.

Before TAOCP came The Art of the Organ-Builder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_B%C3%A9dos_de_Celles?wprov...

- "sensible"

There's no such thing as an unsensible hobby. Who could even arbitrate that? Who arbitrates what the meaning of fun is, for you, personally?

wives

How do your wives get along?

If they don’t, you’re in a world of hurt. Maybe if they live in different houses it could work?

They probably also shouldn't know about one other unless it's a poly situation. And then you need a career like a geologist on an oilrig or a submarine naval officer to explain those long absences.

> Who could even arbitrate that?

HOAs. They should be outlawed, or at least made legally non-mandatory.

An example with bent wood pipes: https://www.organclearinghouse.com/3034-zimmer-residence-org...

You can even wrap the pipe back into a tight coil and add valves so the player can change the length manually[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_horn

Congratulations, you have just reinvented the sousaphone

Reminds me of a post on Reddit a few years ago about a guy with an organ in his house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7sT_FqTi6A

Here's another one: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html [1]

[1] Famous for other works in Mad Magazine, mainly

"The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" comes to mind.

Youtuber Look Mum No Computer (who does a lot of experimental electronics and musical work) also recently extracted a former church organ that has been installed in a house, and reconstructed it in his London museum. Really cool stuff!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLluPQLh1xzlI7EMB5qIxD...

This is a huge instrument; the cost of refurbishing it and installing it would easily be $2M+, so the fact that it's free is sort of beside the point!

Or if you're a professional organ refurbisher, now you can have one at home, too!

Yeah, this organ is vastly too large for a house or even a standard large auditorium. This is voiced for a very large concert hall.

The Organ Grinder in Portland was a pizza restaurant with the architecture designed around a large organ system, and reportedlly that one was parted out, rather than preserved as a whole.

https://www.pstos.org/instruments/or/portland/organ-grinder....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_Grinder_Restaurant

(Given that Portland saw an influx of people, and the "keep [city] weird" memes that seem to appear during gentrification, I was a little surprised to hear the entire landmark organ and architecture didn't get preserved in place somehow. Maybe it hit financial troubles a bit too early for the more affluent immigration?)

Organ grinder expert here. The Portland organ grinder was a victim of urban growth boundary and poor cash flow from an allied disco called Earthquake Ethyls.

The land underneath the organ and building was leased. When the metro urban growth boundary was proposed the land owner immediately wanted to liquidate the land holding and gave the organ grinder the option to buy or leave. The organ grinder was profitable but the disco operating concern was not. Consequently, the organ grinder did not have the cash flow necessary to buy the land and had to close. The organ and fixtures were parted out. The local music scene and patrons were deeply saddened. The immense power of what was the largest and highest pressure Wurlitzer theater organ would never again offer its unique tonal capabilities to reproducing rock and pop music of the 40s through 90s.

Today the OG still has a cult following which stays alive thanks to a few recordings posted to YouTube and a lot of great memories. For instance: https://youtu.be/3VN5DGw3OvA

Didn't know what I was expecting when I started listening, but that was quite a song!

The organ grinder had six+ top artists who could bend popular music into the language of that organ like no other similar institution IMHO. Incidentally, Jonas still sounds like that if you give him a fast enough organ and enough audience pressure to play in the old popular music style.

> Consequently, the organ grinder did not have the cash flow necessary to buy the land and had to close. The organ and fixtures were parted out.

That's awful. A successful business and a unique cultural icon, ended because a deal couldn't be reached.

Organ Stop Pizza in Mesa is very similar but still in business AFAIK.

This may be the mother of all white elephants.

This is not where the GPS said we were going.

Similarly, if you like your nostalgia mashed up with unexpected genres, it's worth trying out Organ Trail.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hatsproduc...

Where I am, old electric organs are available for very cheap. I got an old Yamaha Electone a couple of years back, that wasn't working anymore. It was great fun to use an Arduino to read the keys and effectively convert it into a MIDI keyboard, and use an old PC with organ simulation software.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the space to keep it, and had to get rid of it eventually. Some day I if I have more space, I might do that again.

The 1928 Temple Theater organ from New York ended up at the DASA in Germany. On some sundays, there are very enjoyable performances played on this classic piano organ.

Some more details: https://organindex.de/index.php?title=Dortmund/Dorstfeld,_De...

If you wanna build a cheap, digital one based on Linux and Arduino. go to openpipes.org

But nothing beats free, right? ;-)

Looking at a lot of the entries, how do you even go about moving these?

You take out the pipes, fill with them with packaging material, and move them out of the way. Then you unscrew the racking for it, and disconnect all the airflow tubes. Put that somewhere. Keep going until there's nothing left.

Then you either get a very large truck to carry the console, or you pull it apart too.

Generally you make the apprentice do this. I was the apprentice. I got very good at carrying 64-foot pipes from one end of a church building to another.

Where does it say this organ is free? There’s no price listed. Other organs on the same site have prices or explicitly say “free”.

From the site: "The City of San Francisco will give the organ without charge to a new owner with the stipulation that it must remain intact and historically whole."

Doh, somehow missed that, thanks!

What is up w/ the connection of organs to religion?

Couple it w/ a little glia stimulating light and you're off to nirvana...

John Calvin would wholeheartedly agree with you.

My hunch is that only churches were big enough. Also, religion was a major focus of western music, at least as formally sponsored. I have no doubt that there were parallel developments of folk music, but probably using more portable instruments.

Today, tradition. But a lot of churches are using rock bands.

Many 'City Hall's in europe have (big) pipe organs, so it's not just religious organisations. But it's the same deal, you need a building with enough space, and space that doesn't need to be taken up with more pressing matters.

Some bigger theatres have them, which I guess would be another obvious use of them

Nobody knows. It started in about 900AD in monasteries (because the monks were the only people technical enough to maintain and play one) and became part of church tradition a few centuries later.

And after a millenium of use, in the late 1980s to early 1990s almost all churches stopped using them.

> And after a millenium of use, in the late 1980s to early 1990s almost all churches stopped using them.

That surely needs a regional or religious tradition/denominational qualifier?

Religion has always had music. An organ is cheaper, and more scalable, than an orchestra to accompany mass, in both small and large settings. And apart from the very rich, churches were the only places that could afford an organ.

Expected a free organ. Second heart would be cool, timelord style.

So this means they’re an organ donor?

Oh, musical instruments. Nevermind.

As someone whose first language is not English this title confuses me a lot.

Similarly I very recently learned the name of the flute-like instrument is called "recorder" :-(

I think most English native speakers would probably think of human bodily organs before the musical instrument, without context. I definitely did.

Apparently the multiple meanings were already present to some extent as far back as Ancient Greek: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%84%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%B1%C...

It's kind of like '(useful) thingy'.

> Similarly I very recently learned the name of the flute-like instrument is called "recorder" :-(

That one bugged me a lot in elementary school, as I kept thinking "if it's called a recorder, it should record something!".

It does allow you to record - in the now obsolete sense of repeating or practicing; 'record a tune' hasn't always meant (or further implied) 'to a storage medium for automatic playback'.

Which makes sense as they're generally practice instruments, you don't have bands or orchestras with recorder-players, we (at least in the UK) play them in school music lessons without having specific instrument lessons in it or anything else; then some want to play wind instruments and have lessons in flute or clarinet or trumpet or whatever, but not recorder.

Doesn't every language have quirks like this?

My native language, Russian, has the same problem with the word "organ", but at least its two meanings are pronounced with different stressed syllables. There's also the word "замок", can mean a lock or a castle, again depending on which syllable is stressed.

> flute-like instrument is called "recorder"

TIL. This name makes no sense to me.

So this must be where these things end up, after a priest wakes up bleary-eyed after too much sacramental wine on the floor of the church, discovering his organ has been stolen.

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