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

Regarding latch mode:

It looks like you need to set up automation for each stop individually. Ugh! Hopefully I'm wrong about that!

The following doesn't work, but seems like it should:

1) Figure out the stop number of the stop you want to control. You can find that by clicking 'E' for E)dit on the stop itself.
2) Pull up the automation panel in VE (under 'View')
3) Select 'Midi Parameters'. Here you can map automation from your DAW (e.g. a CC) to the desired VE parameter. Search for 'Enable Stop' in the list of available VE automation parameters and then scroll down to the stop number you determined in step 1.

No joy. :-(

VE 7.0.1056
Cubase 11.0.20
Windows 10 (latest)

@wwzeitler said:

It looks like you need to set up automation for each stop individually. Ugh! Hopefully I'm wrong about that!

Recording all automation including individual stop enable/disable is working for me in Cakewalk by just clicking on one button, I suppose every host has a way of doing it with VST3 plugins somehow. But how do I do individual stop selection via MIDI? My PC monitor doesn't have a touch screen and I can't really use a mouse whilst I'm playing. Well, I think Cakewalk has some limited facility for this, and probably other hosts have ways too, but probably not enough for all the stops. I could also do it by making some modifications to my control surface plugin (isn't open source great!), but that option isn't open to everyone. The player should allow the use of RPN/NRPN for stop selection. Or the computer keyboard (the typing one, that is) itself. Just look at how Hauptwerk does it for some ideas.

BTW, you can easily find the stop number by double-clicking on the manual name (underneath the Play/Combine/Mix section) - the stop selection panel for that manual will then expand and you can see the numbers. However, the stop numbers as presented by the player to the host are sequential from 1 to 120, and they don't map one-to-one onto the stop numbers shown in the player. For example, say I enable "stop 80" from my DAW - that actually maps onto stop 116, Soloflute 4' in the player. So, I could write down the mapping, and even implement it in my control surface plugin so it shows the correct names if I really wanted to

@wwzeitler said:

... - Bach had one built to his specifications. In his own day Bach was a music technology freak!

@Angelus said:

the stop numbers as presented by the player to the host are sequential from 1 to 120, and they don't map one-to-one onto the stop numbers shown in the player. For example, say I enable "stop 80" from my DAW - that actually maps onto stop 116, Soloflute 4' in the player. 

So how does one figure out this mapping?

BTW, I also have Hauptwerk, which is marvelous: for the benefit of other posters it occupies an entirely different use case space, being a standalone program for those who want to emulate a pipe organ on a dedicated console and do nothing else. Churches who don't have millions of dollars for a pipe organ, and organists who want a convincing instrument at home are their main audience. Organ consoles that generate nothing but MIDI for Hauptwerk are available -- monster MIDI controllers! A supreme virtue of Hauptwerk is that sample sets from all manner of amazing instruments can be loaded into the program. They've provided a VST for connecting a DAW to it. With Hauptwerk you also have to program your own automation to manipulate stops (and pistons, etc.)

@wwzeitler said:

So how does one figure out this mapping?

The long way! I was planning on writing it out anyway so if you like I'll post it here in text/csv format so you can do what you want with it.

@Angelus said:

The long way! I was planning on writing it out anyway so if you like I'll post it here in text/csv format so you can do what you want with it.

I for one would be grateful!

Here you go, it turned out to be fairly logical in the end. I had to change the file extension to .txt, so rename it to .csv and then you can open it in a spreadsheet and sort the columns how you want.

[EDIT] Just for clarification, the numbers in the left column are the ones in the VST parameter name, which is "Enable Stop n". To get the actual raw VST parameter number, add 911.

@Angelus said:

Here you go, it turned out to be fairly logical in the end.

Thank you kindly! I've got some real work to do first, I'll play with this soon.

You're welcome. Just check out my edit above first.

@Another User said:

[EDIT] Just for clarification, the numbers in the left column are the ones in the VST parameter name, which is "Enable Stop n". To get the actual raw VST parameter number, add 911.

I didn't need to add 911. I just chose CC xx and mapped that to 'Enable Stop 1' and lo and behold the Hauptwerk Principal 8' toggled on and off. The problem I was having was that the stop number you see when you display the stop info is not the same as the stop number in 'Enable Stop X'. Your chart takes care of that mapping.

Thanks again!

Glad to hear it helped.

Despite Cakewalk's "documentation", I've now got stop selection via MIDI working. It's going to be a bit laborious to set up for each stop individually, though, which is why I still think the player should have the ability to map each stop to something like an NRPN according to its displayed stop number by just checking a single box in the options.

[EDIT]To quote someone on the Cakewalk forums, "A lot of VST's use NRPN's for their automation parameters" 😉