Music Keyboards Guide

By far the most impressive of all keyboard instruments is the pipe Organ, and many music keyboards today are able to electronically reproduce its sound.  Cathedral and grand concert hall organs are amazing to listen to, and to be able to play a music keyboard and get a cathedral organ sound, even just to listen to on your headphones, can be really exciting.  Pipe organs are challenging to sample accurately, particularly those in churches and cathedrals since the space they’re in is essentially part of the instrument’s sound.  Also the low pedal stops are challenging to reproduce with speakers.

There have been many attempts to reproduce the sound of a pipe organ electronically while creating a music keyboard instrument that is more portable and cost effective.  The Hammond organ was the most notable attempt at recreating the sound of a pipe organ.  The original Hammond organs use mechanical tonewheels to generate sound, and a combination of the waveforms produced – controlled by drawbars – imitated the effect of a pipe organ’s diverse mix of tones.  It ended up having a distinctive sound that was adopted for performance in jazz, blues, and rock music particularly.  The Hammond organ was invented in the 1930s and it wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that electronic music keyboards were able to reproduce the distinctive sound of this instrument by way of synthesizers.  Nowadays, only a few select music keyboards such as the Hammond-Suzuki XK3, the Nord C2, and the Roland VK-8 can claim to closely reproduce the sound of the Hammond organ.

A realistic pipe organ sound from an electronic music keyboard can only be achieved by sampling each pipe of an actual pipe organ.  Only a few professional music keyboards have authentic pipe organ sounds built in, the Nord C2 being one of them.  The Nord C2 can reproduce a baroque pipe organ sound.  Except, of course, for electronic organ consoles, all other portable music keyboards, even workstations, need to be connected to a computer via MIDI, and the computer needs to be connected to a speaker system to reproduce the sampled organ sound.  There are a few good pipe organ sample libraries available for use with MIDI and sequencing programs which allow one to play the sampled organ sounds using a keyboard connected to the computer via MIDI connection.  One is the  Vienna Instruments Vienna Konzerthaus Organ, a high quality library of a concert hall organ.  Peter Ewer’s Symphonic Organ Samples feature the Cavaille-Coll organ at the Eglise de la Sainte Madeleine in Paris, one of the finest church organs in France.  Notre Dame of Budapest Pipe Organ Samples is another high quality sample library of two symphonic pipe organs in Hungary.  All of these libraries capture multiple individual pipes, the combinations of stops, the space the organ is in, and other details such as windchest noise to create a realistic sound.  Searching for organ samples or virtual organ samples on the web will bring up other quality organ sample libraries.

Any music keyboard with MIDI in/out will do the job of allowing you to play the organ samples mentioned above.  Its better, however, that the keyboard has full sized, “organ weighted” keys so that it feels like a real organ.  Organ keys are “lighter,” or easier to play than piano keys due to the difference in mechanical action required to produce a tone.  For some of the sample libraries, you could setup a multiple manual rig and even use a midi organ pedal-board to get the maximum feel of playing a real pipe organ.  The organ samples are a collection of sounds and require a program to integrate with music keyboards.  Kontakt 2 is one such program that allows one to play certain instrument samples through the computer with a MIDI equipped music keyboard instrument.  Depending on the organ samples, some programs will allow you to route certain organ sounds (such as the organ pedal stops) to certain manuals or the midi organ pedal-board.

Today’s technology allows keyboard musicians to have a satisfying experience playing keyboard instruments such as a piano or organ on electronic music keyboards.  Not only is the physical experience of pressing the keys simulated accurately to a high degree, but also the sound that is produced is very realistic as well (with a good set of speakers or headphones, of course).  Realistic pipe organ samples, such as those of famous cathedrals and concert halls, are very few right now, but the ones that are available now are quite good.  Hopefully, more music keyboards will integrate them as part of the built-in library of sounds in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 3:28 am and is filed under Advice, Electronic Music, Instruments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.