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  • VI Organ lacking bottom end

    E
    E
    I put the VI organ to work on Bach's Passacaglia and to my surprise the 32 foot pitch pedals all have the fundamental reduced in the lowest octave. I ran the samples directly into a spectrum analyzer VST and as I played down the keyboard I could see the fundamental surpress approximantely 20dB in the lowest octave. I even saw this on the Principalbass 32' which should be as close to a pure tone as possible. This is a problem for me because it looses one of the most impressive aspects of an organ.
  • S
    S
    Hey Eric, I noticed that in the demo too -- I thought maybe it was just the demo or the internet connection. I listened to the Durufle and the ending with the 32 reed was also kind of a letdown. I'm an organist and we look forward to hearing 32 foot stops really bring the house down... I wonder why the fundamental is turned down, if indeed it is.

    Steve
  • E
    E
    The microphone chosen to do the samples could have a roll off in the bottom end, I've seen this before. Or, the mic preamp may have had a high pass filter in, doubtful though as these are usually at a higher frequency.

    I'm afraid that since it is in the lowest octave, they could have decided that to make a more "playable" sample that they would just roll this off to prevent speakers from flogging. I hope this is just a mistake because we are professionals and it should be up to us to bandlimit, or not, the final mix.

    I have listened to many fine recordings and I know this organ puts out more of the fundamental in these big pipes. And as I said, you can see the fundamental disappear in an FFT as you play down the organ.

    So until they post a new download of the 32' pipes, I am just adding back the fundamental with a synth plugin with a slow attack. This works well to restore the samples to their original glory.

    Please Vienna, don't be mad at us, it's just that that low earth shaking bass of the 32' pipes is what guys like us live for.
  • N
    N
    Well I'm running a 10" powered sub, and any louder I would worry about my speakers.
  • DietzD
    VSL Team
    DietzD
    While the theoretical fundamentals of the 32' stops are somewhere below 20 Hz, what you hear in reality are mostly the first (or even second) harmonics.

    While recording the Konzerthaus Organ, I had 16 microphones to choose from, put into four different positions in the Great Hall, so if there was _any_ signal _anywhere_, I captured it [H] ... No LoCut was applied within the microphones or the mic-pres, and we monitored each single sample carefully on the FFT-analyser during the extensive post-production process, to avoid any unintentional loss of power. - I even phase-aligned the microphone-positions individually in quite a few cases to get the most out of our recordings.

    Compared with commercial releases of organ music, the sound we offer is pretty "big" and well-defined from top to bottom, BTW. [;)]

    In some tests, I got beautiful results with some healthy EQ-ing below 50 Hz, but I don't like the idea of releasing samples with "built-in beauty surgery", so to say. Just boost the bottom octave according to your taste. [:)]

    Taking into account the enormous amount of work involved into the release of this instrument, I think it is save to say that we won't "redo" it from the ground up in the near future.

    HTH!
    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
  • J
    J
    Reccently when I was doing some speaker/room tests I found that with nodes the volume of low bass frequencies (we were looking at between 30 and 40 Hz) the volume was varying by up to 20 dB over small positional changes.

    So I guess microphones in a large space would be similarly affected. Also as the frequencies change so do the node positions.

    Great thing about organs is that really low frequency - I recorded in Worcester Cathedral many years back - it has a true 64 foot pipe the organ was also a bit hissy unfortunately! acoustic air noise!

    My studio monitors sort of roll off rapidly below 30 hertz but I do have some IMF Transmission Line loudspeakers, which though not as loud as the studio monitors, are capable of reproducing 16 Hz. More of a vibration reallly but for everything else to sit on musically wise very effective.

    Julian
  • W
    W
    I am also an organist and don't know what ericbrooking or stmain are talking about. This has a huge sound in the 32' stops. I used it in the Apotheosis and March No. 3 demos for example, and it was about to take down the studio. [[:|]]
  • E
    E
    You can see the fundamental drop 20dB in the lowest octave. The sound is still powerful, as Dietz said you are mostly hearing the higher harmonics. The fundamental however is more of a feeling than audio and if you have speakers that put out 16Hz, it's an amazing thing. I think that it is correct that the room itself could cause noles at these frequencies. And Dietz is also correct in saying that you can tweak it to your tastes. Since the fundamental is just a sinewave, I just added a simple synth plugin to act like an oscillator and added it in to bring up the fundamental to match the other harmonics and it sounds great.

    No worries, most people would roll it off anyway, I'm just crazy about that feeling. Thanks for making such a versatile instrument. I love having access to so many different ranks. Normally organ samples are just a standard church registration, principal, oct, 2', mixture IV, something like that. This organ is really useful, I can pull any rank I want and build my own registrations. Thanks Dietz.