[Edit] Just looked into the Organ Player somewhat deeper and nope, it's nowhere near MPE functionality; it has its own ways and means, not all of which are immediately obvious or intuitive.

@Angelus said:

So anyway, I finally have things exactly as I want them

Well, no, not really because I realised I can't use the couplers in this setup without enabling stops in manuals other than the one that the player instance is dedicated to, and that then runs into the whole "combinations only set or clear stops" thing all over again. I was going to write a custom control surface for a Windows tablet that I have to handle the combinations for all the instances, so maybe I can put that between my keyboard and PC to handle the couplers as well. [EDIT] I now have limited coupler capability (so far: Hauptwerk to Pedal, Positiv to Pedal, Positiv to Hauptwerk, Schwellwerk to Hauptwerk and Schwellwerk to Positiv) via a small MIDI utility I wrote 😃

I found another very small issue, though, which is that there's some ugly "zipper noise" each time I stop the playback of a recording whilst a note is sounding. I don't get this on any of the other 50 or so VSTs that I have, including VI Pro. It happens even if all channel FX and IR reverb are disabled.

About the no-sound Positiv:

This is strange. As you can see from the standalone, if you have set channel 2 to Positiv, you should get sound from it, when you play a channel 2 note on message. However, there are several things that could be worth checking in your setup:

- If you are using multiple instances and you change your MIDI input settings in one of them, the other instances won't have those settings until you restart your host. We actually need to make that clearer in the settings.

- This is someting I ran into myself (In my case it was Logic Pro): When the MIDI channel you set up in your DAW is say channel 3 but you play your keyboard from channel 2, the host will only forward channel 3. So please double check if the player actually receives channel 2 messages. The way you could double check which chanel the player actually receives (I admit, it's clunky):

1. Set all your Werks to different channel inputs

2. Solo the track you have the Positiv on. Now enable/disable a stop on every Werk. The note you Werk you will hear corresponds to the MIDI input the player receives.

- The fact that the keyboard lights up isn't really surprising: It lights up no matter which note ons it gets... And when you play it it actually fires note ons for all channels

I hope this helps! If not, please contact our support in that regard.

@badibeat said:

Vienna Instruments Pro allows to activate key velocity

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.

I am not entirely sure but I think the Vienna Organ Player already features a way of achieving that.

Please watch the attached video for more info

@Another User said:

Please watch the attached video for more info

Ahh - so VO can effectively have up to 12 velocity zones!

"I am not entirely sure but I think the Vienna Organ Player already features a way of achieving that.

Please watch the attached video for more info"

I am so glad you included this!

I'm all for historical realism, but I am sure many organists and composers would have loved organs to be velocity-sensitive, so the ability to now add that with a computer interface is wonderful. I made a matrix to do the same with the VSL harpsichord :-)

@Pyre said:

I'm all for historical realism, but I am sure many organists and composers would have loved organs to be velocity-sensitive, so the ability to now add that with a computer interface is wonderful.

I like sounds and techniques to be authentic too but there comes a point where it would just be silly to ignore the capabilities we have now. I only have the one keyboard and so, for example, I use velocity-switching to effectively layer different manuals.

How would I record registration changes? That is, while I'm playing, I add/remove stops. Might those not be recorded midi messages so when I play back it duplicates EVERYTHING I did while playing?

This feature looks great for auto-capturing your registration at the beginning of the piece. But what about adding/removing stops during the piece? (A very common thing for organists to do!)

Regarding velocity sensitive pipe organs:

I'm both a professional pianist and organist. I also put myself through music school as a piano technician, and I do the routine maintenance on the pipe organ at the church where I play. With that background, I have some thoughts for your consideration:

Let's think about the physics of the basic sound producing mechanisms of both the piano and organ. The pitch of the piano string is determined entirely by material (steel vs brass, etc.), length, diameter and tension. To be sure at high energy impulses into the string (high velocity) the pitch probably deviates from the norm for a few milliseconds, but for all musical purposes the strings speaks at the same pitch regardless of low or high energy/velocity impulse

Organ pipes are quite different. The technology by which the key is connected to the pipe doesn't matter (tracker, direct electric, whatever) -- even if you're using some newfangled flux-capacitor-quantum-microprocessor valve, it still boils down to how much air is going into the pipe (zero to whatever). Importantly, organ pipes vary in pitch depending on the wind pressure -- this is true for the flues (most of the pipes) and triply so for the reeds. Organ builders go to great lengths to regulate the air pressure, with mechanisms to manage sudden demand (big chord at full organ) so the pitch doesn't drop.

In short, the physics of a piano string (or strings in general) lends itself to velocity variations, but real world organ pipes do not.

Furthermore, the keyboards of pianos and organs are physically similar, but the issues of playing them and consequently effective technique for playing are quite different. For example, because there is no damper pedal on the organ, legato has to be accomplished by fingers alone. This results in a quite different approach to playing -- 3 passing over 4, 3 over 2, and 4 over 5 are common on organ and rare on piano, for example.

Finally -- it's worth mentioning latency. When I play a piano patch with latency much more than about 5 ms or so, it drives me crazy because that's not how real pianos behave. But with pipe organs it's common to deal with rather large latencies: sound travels approx 1 foot/ms (.3 meter/ms) so in a 20 meter room (not that large) with the console in the back and the pipes in the front your looking at 60ms (!) of latency. So large latencies with organ samples feel natural to me, but drive me absolutely crazy with piano samples. I've been in organ performance situations like this where I'm watching the conductor (speed of light), and I hear myself an 8th note behind what my fingers are doing. That's just part of learning to play pipe organs, and yet another way that pianos and organs are very different beasts!

So, if we're dealing with samples, there's no reason why you couldn't have a velocity sensitive organ sample.  (Load one up in Kontakt!) It would feel as weird to me personally as a non-velocity sensitive piano. But you'd venturing more into the realm of synthesizers than trying to reproduce real instruments. Which is fine, if that's what you want to do!

@wwzeitler said:

So, if we're dealing with samples, there's no reason why you couldn't have a velocity sensitive organ sample.  (Load one up in Kontakt!) It would feel as weird to me personally as a non-velocity sensitive piano. But you'd venturing more into the realm of synthesizers than trying to reproduce real instruments. Which is fine, if that's what you want to do!

Well, you can route key velocity to the swell function to make the organ player velocity sensitive after a fashion! But if it had been physical possible on real organs, they might have needed far fewer stops. Anyway, I'm perfectly happy with organs not being velocity sensitive, though as I've said, I sometimes do use velocity for combination switching.

@Konrad said:

I am not entirely sure but I think the Vienna Organ Player already features a way of achieving that.

The video shows how velocity can be used for key switching.

I however am interested at playing the sounds with velocity. The faster (or harder) I press a key, the louder.

@wwzeitler said:

Regarding velocity sensitive pipe organs:

.... So, if we're dealing with samples, there's no reason why you couldn't have a velocity sensitive organ sample.  (Load one up in Kontakt!) It would feel as weird to me personally as a non-velocity sensitive piano. But you'd venturing more into the realm of synthesizers than trying to reproduce real instruments. Which is fine, if that's what you want to do!

That's definitely the way I want to do - getting rid of some limitations of the real instrument and play it in a way I like.

I was listening to the Big Fugue in G Minor demo, and it made me sad that it sounds so static.

There's this project sponsored by Schweizer Nationalfonds where the organist and composer Daniel Glaus developed a mechanical Organ with mechanical controls per key. It features also some mechanical after touch. 

The linked document is only available in German, though, but deepl is your friend here (forget google translate):

Deutsch:  Quantensprung im Orgelbau - CORDIS Forschungsergebnisse der EU

Edit: Johann Sebastian Bach might have liked this. He also composed Das Wohltemperierte Clavier, for reasons. He was living in a time where instruments developed, and embraced the developments.

Hi, 

@wwzeitler said:

This feature looks great for auto-capturing your registration at the beginning of the piece. But what about adding/removing stops during the piece? (A very common thing for organists to do!)

Please give it a try, it should work just as I think you expect it. 

Best, 
Paul

We're not really bound to realism ;) You can expect an update enabling key velocity.

"I was listening to the Big Fugue in G Minor demo, and it made me sad that it sounds so static."

(I have not listened to the Fugue in G Minor demo, but speaking generally:)

It needn't. Another difference between piano and organ is decay: piano notes decay and organ notes sustain indefinitely. One of the consequences of this is that the release of a note on an organ is just as apparent to the listener as the attack. Organists can take advantage of this by controlling the duration of each note -- we're talking about millisecond variations here. So if you have four 1/16th notes, you can do, say legato between 1 and 2 and the rest are detached -- giving the illusion of accentuating the first note. Or even if they're all detached from each other, making note 1 a few milliseconds longer than 2,3,4 will also give the illusion of accentuating the first note. 

You can also make whole phrases 'airy-er' by increasing slightly the gaps/silences between notes. Or 'thicker' by decreasing the gaps. You can also make a phrase super-legato by slightly overlapping the notes (negative gap?) You can also apply this to whole passages. In the Great Fugue in Gm you could have smaller gaps at the strong beginning, make the gaps a little bigger in the more introspective passages in the middle to make them sound lighter, then make the gaps smaller again towards the end for a stronger sounding finish. You get the idea. Sure, it's not the same as velocity sensitivity, but there's also much more one can do to expressively phrase notes on the organ than one might think.

(An important factor is the size of the room and instrument -- the reverb of a large room will obscure these sort of subtleties. Although Bach played on large instruments all over what was more or less Germany at the time, the largest instrument on which he had a regular job was only TWO MANUALS -- in consequently less than gargantuan rooms. Now, huge organs are of course great fun, but smaller instruments do have a clarity and transparency that huge instruments may not. Tradeoffs yet again.)

And we haven't even gotten to manual or registration changes. I've heard some organists play a long piece like the Great Gm entirely on only one manual. WHY? Or don't even do a simple registration change like add a reed or mixture towards the end. WHY?

Some organists (and pianists and violinists...) play statically -- boring is not necessarily the fault of the instrument! 

 As an aside, one of Bach's "side jobs" was technically evaluating new organs (were they built well or not) -- he was quite expert in that technology. Think about it: a pipe organ in those days was easily the most complex machine humans were making at that time (certainly in the West). Arguably it remained the most complex machine humans were making until the latter 19th century.  In other words, Bach was fiercely interested in the most advanced music technology of his day. Towards the end of his life he also had the opportunity to try out the newly invented pianoforte -- liked it very much but had some concrete suggestions on how to improve it (which the builder took to heart). Or, check out the Lautenwerck (http://www.baroquemusic.org/barluthp.html)  -- Bach had one built to his specifications. In his own day Bach was a music technology freak!

Thanks Konrad! A very welcome update. I've no doubt it will, for one thing, make the chores of obtaining and maintaining desired voice-balances much quicker and easier.

As for creative use of modulating note-by-note volume by means of velocity, I'd offer a word of caution.

During my early experiments with orchestral intonation I found out the hard way that the pianoforte is certainly not a suitable instrument for intoning in any way other than traditionally. Why? I'm convinced it's because we are all so deeply accustomed to the sound and tuning of the piano that even small departures from that tuning can be instantly noticeable - tending to stick out like sore thumbs and so causing unwelcome disruptions in the listening experience. Somewhat similarly, though for fewer people, we are not accustomed to hearing substantial note-by-note modulation of volume in pipe organ performances.

It's the old case of being mindful that the human organism is enormously adaptable - including our hearing - and that anyone can, in isolation as an individual, all too quickly become accustomed to almost anything within the vast scope of our adaptabilities. And yet in very large populations (which include our listeners), deeply embedded "normalities" tend to change only very slowly - except in the case of a dramatically successful innovation. Call it culture, call it what you will but it's something very real and worth treating with cautious respect.

That said, I'll certainly not stand in the way of attempted innovations in music. "Naturalisation" means the innovation is successfully internalised by many people, all the cultural gatekeeping has been satisfied and the world has duly changed for those people; it is inherently a democratic, distributed, cultural process, hence it is also - most especially in the case of music - beyond any individual's power to impose or prevent. Moreover, it's not without its own sanctions, positive and negative; so one might add, "careful with that axe, Eugene".

I'm not getting anywhere with 'latch mode'. I'm struggling in Vienna Ensemble trying to figure out how automation applies. Is there a tutorial JUST on Vienna Ensemble automation -- something I have never used before? The available tutorials seem to gloss over it at best. I'm very comfortable using automation in Cubase, but I don't get how this relates to the automation feature in VE.

I'm not finding the Vienna Ensemble manual helpful either. In the chapter "Parameter Automation", for example, the first step is "Choose the corresponding parameter in your sequencer [OK, this must be one of the organ stops in the Rieger] and choose from the available automation modes (Read | Latch | Touch | Write)." Where? I'm not seeing how to select that option anywhere.

I would be grateful for pointers to where all this is explained.

Thanks!

William Zeitler