World's Largest Musical Instrument

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bitflipper
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2018/09/30 15:15:51 (permalink)

World's Largest Musical Instrument

This is a fascinating peek inside the Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia, from one of my favorite YouTube presenters.
 
If you're unfamiliar with Fran Blanche, she is a musician, recording engineer and electrical engineer who designs boutique analog stompboxes in her day job but is obsessed with vintage tech. Her videos are worth seeking out. They're low-key and conversational but often surprisingly deep.
 



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    Mesh
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    Re: World's Largest Musical Instrument 2018/09/30 16:18:27 (permalink)
    Wow...that's just an amazing instrument and so nice to see such a historic piece kept alive. Thanks for posting this Bit, my older children will love to watch this.

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    bitflipper
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    Re: World's Largest Musical Instrument 2018/09/30 17:11:52 (permalink)
    Here's part 2, which looks at the console. Enough controls there to keep a modular synthesist happy for hours. Note how long it takes the expert to locate a specific tab. This 100-year-old instrument actually has presets! Plus you could actually dial a telephone from the console. 120+ ms latency. That's gotta be really challenging for a beginner.
     



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    bitflipper
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    Re: World's Largest Musical Instrument 2018/09/30 17:37:42 (permalink)
    Part 3 shows how you clean the pipes. Bear in mind that there are 28,000 of them, so it's a big task.



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    Glyn Barnes
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    Re: World's Largest Musical Instrument 2018/09/30 18:22:39 (permalink)
    Looks interesting, I have bookmarked it to watch later.

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    Starise
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    Re: World's Largest Musical Instrument 2018/10/01 11:51:03 (permalink)
    I have heard this. Amazing.

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    dmbaer
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    Re: World's Largest Musical Instrument 2018/10/08 21:51:19 (permalink)
    Watched this last night - pretty impressive if know anything about how organs are constructed.
     
    I got to go on a tour of an organ "factory" a couple years ago - just a little north-east of Oakland CA.  These folks make only large custom organs - maybe three instruments every couple of years for well-healed churches mostly.  The range of skills required is ample.  The owner told us that the best people he hires tend to be very good auto mechanics, of all things.  Organs these days are a combination of new high tech (console with full MIDI capabilities) and traditional crafts of woodworking, metal working, pipe voicing and tuning, etc.
     
    One thing I learned at one point is that organs do in fact need to be tuned periodically.  And then they go immediately out of tune to a degree as soon as the temperature or humidity changes, which is exactly why they sound so rich.  A "tuned" organ's pipes have a standard deviation from exact tuning of about 5 cents according a a friend of mine who is an expert organist (he has one of the ten most prestigious church gigs in the entire state of California and does know what he's talking about).  He once told me that he heard a perfectly tuned organ once and said it sounded "electronic".  In his mind, that term is extremely pejorative.
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    bitflipper
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    Re: World's Largest Musical Instrument 2018/10/09 02:48:54 (permalink)
    I recently had occasion to look up tuning specs for a Hammond organ versus a Vox Continental. The latter is "perfectly" tuned, the former isn't. Supports your thesis.


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    ØSkald
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    Re: World's Largest Musical Instrument 2018/10/09 21:31:27 (permalink)
    Thanks for sharing! I would love to hear it myself.

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