FREE UPDATE: Great Rieger Organ OUT NOW!

[Paul]

Hi everybody,

A multi-timbral Vienna Organ Player, packed with features and based on the cutting edge technologies we developed for our established Synchron Player Software? A dream come true, with the Great Rieger Organ!

VIDEOS:

• Intro Video
• Stop Tour with Guy Bacos
• Getting to know the new Vienna Organ Player, with Paul Fey

You will get 5 manuals which can be controlled on one master keyboards or via separate MIDI channels: Hauptwerk, Positiv, Schwellwerk, Solowerk, and Pedalwerk.

116 stops of the Great Rieger Organ in the Vienna Konzerthaus are at your fingertips - simply click on a stop to engage it instantaneous, and create your personal organ registrations on the fly.

The player incorporates features like tremulant, swell (Schwellwerk), as well as the usual mixing options and plugins you already know from the Synchron Player - all per manual!

And to make things easier, especially for organ novices, we added usefull meta-data to the GUI like color-coded sound-categories + the loudness of each stop.

It’s super easy to edit the volume, pan, AHDS curve, tuning, start offset, and mixer routing of each stop!

Now is the time to treat yourself with some nice/impressive/mighty/out-of-world sounding organ sounds!

Enjoy!

[Pixelpoet1985]

I really like the new GUI, looks more "professional" than the normal, more colorful Synchron Player. Especially the slider, knobs and the keyswitches at the bottom. Maybe you can adapt some of it.

[Macker]

OMG I'm in!! 

Even a cursory survey of the seriously well sampled libraries of great European pipe organs shows that this one is very competetively priced. And at this introductory offer it's a no-brainer!

Thanks to the excellent intro videos I'm already very happy with the general feel of the stops (and delighted with the monster 32-foot pipes). Also I really love what I've seen so far of VSL's new Organ Player - just so sensible, clear and intuitive.

One huge advantage of this organ library is of course the relatively short reverb times of the Wien Konzerthaus compared to large churches and cathedrals - it's so easy to lengthen shorter reverb tails exactly as desired with plugins.

[Seventh Sam]

Thank you for the very reasonable crossgrade price - makes this a no-brainer for me!  I agree with Macker: baked in concert ambience makes this much, much easier to work outside of a solo organ context than other organ libraries.

[MMKA]

The beautiful samples of the Vienna Konzerthaus Organ has been implemented now in a very useful player. Now this is very useful for live playing ánd with a DAW or notation software. Together with the church venues, that has been added, this is an excellent organ library!! Congratulations, team of VSL, on this new virtual musical instrument you brought into the market. In my opinion another milestone.

[fratveno]

No stepper?

[Angelus]

@fratveno said:

No stepper?

Is that what I would call a crescendo pedal? From the pictures I have of the actual organ, I think it might have a Rollschweller crescendo roller to the left of the swell pedals. so something like that would useful.

As for another wish list item (and perhaps it's already got that but I'm not able to download it until this evening), super- and sub-octave couplers with unison on/off.

I'm looking forward to trying the tremulant - you can't really use the Vox Humana without it!

[fratveno]

@fratveno said:

No stepper?

Is that what I would call a crescendo pedal? From the pictures I have of the actual organ, I think it might have a Rollschweller crescendo roller to the left of the swell pedals. so something like that would useful.

As for another wish list item (and perhaps it's already got that but I'm not able to download it until this evening), super- and sub-octave couplers with unison on/off.

I'm looking forward to trying the tremulant - you can't really use the Vox Humana without it!

With Stepper I meant two buttons (>> and <<😉 to advance forward or backward sequentially through the registration slots with single commands (from the sequencer).  Addressing each of the 12x12 registration slots by individual key switches seems tedious... (and only 144 slots seems a bit 1950-ish...)

I only installed it last nite, so I may (hopefully) be overlooking something, but there are no swell pedals to be seen either, so I guess one has to simulate swell behavior with a CC (11 perhaps 😊

There are super- and sub couplers, but no unison off, as far as I can see...

[Ben]

@fratveno said:

No stepper?

Is that what I would call a crescendo pedal? From the pictures I have of the actual organ, I think it might have a Rollschweller crescendo roller to the left of the swell pedals. so something like that would useful.

As for another wish list item (and perhaps it's already got that but I'm not able to download it until this evening), super- and sub-octave couplers with unison on/off.

I'm looking forward to trying the tremulant - you can't really use the Vox Humana without it!

The Organ Player has a crescendo pedal feature with up to 12 steps - the lower combination banks make use of it (default mapping: CC1 / Mod-Wheel). Simply right-click a combination bank and select "Switch to CC" to enable convert the selected bank to crescendo mode.

Octave couplers (with unison off) are also present. Simply click on the -1 / +1 buttons on the right of the combination bank above the keyboard. (https://www.vsl.info/manuals/organ-player/gui-overview -> no 15 in the screenshot).

[Ben]

@fratveno said:

I only installed it last nite, so I may (hopefully) be overlooking something, but there are no swell pedals to be seen either, so I guess one has to simulate swell behavior with a CC (11 perhaps 😊

There are super- and sub couplers, but no unison off, as far as I can see...

Swell pedal is controlled via CC11, but you can re-map it to another controller of course.

The unisono off button is visible as soon as you activate both, super and sub coupler.

[Angelus]

@fratveno said:

With Stepper I meant two buttons (>> and <<😉 to advance forward or backward sequentially through the registration slots with single commands (from the sequencer).

Ahh, I have keyboards and synths with that functionality (and indeed would never attempt any sort of live performance without it), but I've never had the evident pleasure of playing a pipe organ that had it.

[Pyre]

Oh my goodness. I don't think I've ever been moved to tears by a product launch video before. The Interstellar soundtrack was a great choice, and of course Toccata and Fugue to end on.

I bought the Konzerthaus Organ a couple of years ago and to be honest I've never used it that much. Always wanted to, but understanding how was just so impenetrable with all the different options in VI Pro. I read the manual and added the stops and still didn't have much idea what I was doing. This new interface is exactly what I wanted!

I'm really glad to see the Teldex studio included in the list of venues mentioned, that's the venue I use 90% of the time. Will the Steinhofkirche have presets too? Either way, I will be buying this this evening.

[fratveno]

@fratveno said:

With Stepper I meant two buttons (>> and <<😉 to advance forward or backward sequentially through the registration slots with single commands (from the sequencer).

Ahh, I have keyboards and synths with that functionality (and indeed would never attempt any sort of live performance without it), but I've never had the evident pleasure of playing a pipe organ that had it.

😊 the real organ now has 5 x 1000 (5000) free Setzer combinations.  The VSL version has 12 x 12 (144).
Still, with the virtual organ now much improved both regarding sound and operation, I'd like to suggest a Feature-Request for stepper functionality in the next player edition... 

To access the registrations from a sequencer I will currently need to make up 24 Key switches...

ROW1, ROW2, .... ROW12 
SLOT1, SLOT2, .... SLOT12
rather than just two (SLOT>>, SLOT<<😉
Stepping sequentially through registrations is how nearly all organists would prepare their concert programs.

[Macker]

I second Fratveno's Feature Request for a stepper. He's said it all for me also.

I've bought this superb library and ... well ... like Pyre admitted, tears have been involved for me too, as well as thrills, joy, inspiration and profound satisfaction. Thank you so very much, VSL.

I have a 61-note MIDI controller keyboard stacked closely above my main 88-note keyboard, and a 17-note Studiologic MP-117 pedal keyboard on the floor. These are enabling me to have tremendous fun with the the Great Rieger. I also have a Yamaha MFC10 MIDI foot controller board which includes a swell-type pedal, but I don't (yet) have enough clear floorspace to place it alongside the MP-117 so I might buy a separate MIDI swell pedal for now.

Also I've been trying out lots of multi-channel spatialisations, special Fx, etc, by routing the Organ Player's mix channels out to various aux channles in my DAW and - oh man - getting some really stunning results with my plugins. [Edit: When all factory audio fx are switched off there's no audible baked-in hall reverb at all!! So the Gt. Rieger library is infinitely accommodating for the user's own spatialisation setups ... and I am now seriously spellbound!]

I'm sure it must be illegal these days to have this much enjoyment, lolol.

Btw, I know it's very late (perhaps too late) to be suggesting this, but for a musical opener in one of your Great Rieger promo videos, VSL, can there be a better and more instant attention-grabber than the opening of this astounding piece by Max Reger (especially when played with the dramatic flourish of Roberto Marini, as here at the St Florian Basilika in Austria)?

[Angelus]

I finally managed to get it downloaded. At last, this how an organ should be played!

The only real negative comment I have is about the GUI. I really appreciate that it's scalable, but even at larger sizes I'm still having problems with it. Grey-on-grey is a good choice when working in low-light conditions, but for the sake of others like me with eyesight that's not as good as it once was, PLEASE can we have a higher-contrast option? All it would take to significantly improve the usability for me would be for the stop names on the COMBINE page to be in white (or at least, a much brighter shade of grey) if not selected.

A few more small points:

• The octave and suboctave "couplers" aren't working as I would understand them. They seem to affect all manuals, but they should be per manual and the "unison off" feature should not need both the super- and sub-octave to be set. For example, if I play C4 on the Hauptwerk and have it coupled to the Positiv, I should be able to have suboctave, superoctave and/or unison off for the Positiv only so that I can get all possible combinations of C3, C4 and C5 sounding on the Positiv (C3, C4, C5, C3+C4, C4+C5, C3+C5 and C3+C4+C5), while still only having C4 sounding on the Hauptwerk.
• The tremulant has a good sound but perhaps it's a little fast for my liking, so would it be possible to add a speed option as well as depth? I just noticed that all tremulant parameters are available as CCs.
• I seem to be having problems understanding how the swell should work (or not work) across different manuals. OK, the answer to this one is on the MIX page rather than the PLAY page, where I can enable/disable the swell per manual and even assign two expression pedals to different manuals.
• This one is maybe not so small, unless (as is always possible) I'm failing to understand something. So, the combinations all seem to affect all manuals, which would be fine if the combinations weren't just turning each stop on or off. On pre-digital electrified actions, there would typically be banks of three-position switches to set up the combinations with each switch corresponding to a particular stop within a particular combination - up for on, down for off and centre to ignore, but there seems to be no equivalent to this. The way it seems to be now is fine for performance (and in a DAW where I can use multiple instances of the player), but not much good for live improvisation. For improvisation, by definition you don't set everything up in advance, rather you would have combinations that set various sound textures for each manual individually. I can't just open the combinations window and select combinations for each manual/pedals separately because, for example, setting a pedal combination clears all the manual stops.
• A late addition (or rather, a subtraction): Where did the Schwellwerk Septime 1 1/7 go??? I hope it wasn't dropped just because it wouldn't quite fit nicely in the GUI! (BTW, Paul Kopf states in the opening post that there are 116 stops, which is not correct as there were some stops apparently not in good enough condition when the original VI samples were recorded.)

All of that said, I'm immensely pleased that the Positiv Unda Maris D6 sample seems to be fixed now!

[alexandr]

Intersting instrument for sure. I only don't understand why it's associated with Synchron Stage?

"The libraries labeled "SYNCHRON" were recorded at our own Synchron Stage Vienna and played by members of the Synchron Stage Orchestra."

"Libraries labeled "SYNCHRON-ized" contain re-edited samples from our VI Series that were re-edited and optimized for the Vienna Synchron Player."

"Great Rieger Organ. Legendary instrument at Vienna Konzerthaus"

Perhaps it's "SYNCHRON-ized" or any third option with all respect.

[badibeat]

Got confirmation today that I get to keep the Konzerthaus Organ license with the offered crossgrade to Great Rieger Organ, so I will get it.

If it does not offer a way to turn on key velocity, then I'll probably not use it much, though.

Vienna Instruments Pro allows to activate key velocity, also for Konzerthaus Organ presets. But that took me quite some time to do.

[Angelus]

@badibeat said:

Vienna Instruments Pro allows to activate key velocity

That was a real help because I could set up what were effectively different combinations for different velocity zones. Maybe with the new combination facility it won't be needed, though.

[badibeat]

@badibeat said:

Vienna Instruments Pro allows to activate key velocity

That was a real help because I could set up what were effectively different combinations for different velocity zones. Maybe with the new combination facility it won't be needed, though.

Glad to be of help. Konzerthaus Organ was the first instrument I bought vom VSL, and soon after that Vienna Instruments Pro, even before I was sure that it can give me key velocity.

However, I had to make a custom preset containing each register and change it there, manually. I'd be happy if presets were XML or JSON so I could edit them as text and diff them.

[fratveno]

@Angelus said:

The octave and suboctave "couplers" aren't working as I would understand them. They seem to affect all manuals, but they should be per manual and the "unison off" feature should not need both the super- and sub-octave to be set. 

Oops, yes, this is completely unusable...