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Miller Pipe Organ strives to be pitch perfect

Started by KB7DQH, December 25, 2011, 09:00:56 AM

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KB7DQH

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20111220/FEATURES/312200037/Miller-Pipe-Organ-tuning-building-repairing-church-organs

and

http://www.wtsp.com/video/1336768047001/1/Louisvilles-Miller-Pipe-Organ-Tuner



QuoteJohn Ball stood on a ladder at the front of Bardstown Road Presbyterian Church, amid the piercing wail of a trilling high note played on the church's organ.

Using a long, straight metal tool called a tuning knife, Ball moved the metal sleeve at the top of one of the organ's pipes a fraction of an inch at a time. As he did so, the note's pitch bent, into tune. The sound the pipe made was familiar to anyone who has ever tuned a guitar — its dissonance registered as a wavering, unsettling tone whose fluctuations slowed, then vanished as Ball brought it into tune.

He calls this process "getting the canaries out," and he would repeat it countless times as he tuned the 90-year-old organ. The exposed pipes in "flower boxes" at the front of the church accounted for only a fraction of the total — there were dozens more in lofts tucked away on either side of the chancel. To access the tangle of pipes in each loft, Ball had to climb up a wooden ladder to an unguarded platform about 8 feet off the ground.

"I once fell 12 feet," Ball reported from up in the loft. The tuning knives he had been holding cut up the insides of his arms. "It was interesting. Needless to say, it hurt."

Ball's employer, Miller Pipe Organ, is the region's largest organ service company, with customers in 22 states, ranging from Kentucky to Texas. In Kentucky alone, it tunes around 200 instruments , with 70 in Louisville, and 400 across its entire service area. In addition to tuning, pipe organs have leather components that periodically need replacing, and after decades of use, other mechanical parts have to be replaced.

That's far more than the two other companies that service pipe organs in Louisville. Peter Webber of Webber and Borne Organ Builders said his company services about 100 instruments in Kentucky and neighboring states, while Sam Bowerman of River City Organ Works services between 50 and 90 instruments, depending on the season.

Miller also rebuilds old organs and has received orders for two new organs in the past year.

Quote
Still, even as revenues rise — the company brought in $600,000 in fiscal 2009, and doubled that figure in 2010, according to owner Curtis Bobsin — Miller has had to diversify to stay afloat.

"Pipe organs are a declining industry, and they have been for at least 30 years," said Bobsin, who bought the business from founder Jim Miller in 2010. "I don't see that trend reversing."

Part of the reason for the decline is pipe organs' cost. The replacement cost for a medium-sized organ, like the one that Bardstown Presbyterian bought in 1921 for $3,600, can now run from a quarter to half a million dollars. The industry also faces competition from electronic organs, which produce similar sound for a fraction of the cost — though they more quickly become obsolete.

To ensure a future for his business, Bobsin uses the company's woodworking expertise for furniture building, as well as design and remodeling services under a subsidiary called Krate Custom.

But for him and Ball, nothing replaces the work with a genuine pipe organ. Many of the organs Miller services go back a hundred years, with a history of additions, tweaks, stop-gap fixes and alterations. Each has a peculiar set of imperfections and quirks etched in the memories of technicians like Ball.

"It's a living, breathing thing," Ball said of the organ at Bardstown Presbyterian, which was built by Louisville's Pilcher organ company.
Level of expertise

Like most organ service technicians, Ball came to the job as a musician — he had played organ in a church in Madison, Ind. The art of tuning takes years to master — years spent as a "keyholder," an assistant who calls out notes from the organ console while the tuner makes adjustments to the pipes.

Bardstown Presbyterian was one of more than 70 instruments that Ball tuned in the two months running up to Christmas, when churches want their organs sounding their best. Heat and humidity affect tuning, so most churches also tune their instruments in the spring when they crank up the air conditioning, and again in autumn when the heat comes on.

Quote
Jim Miller founded the company in 1975 after graduating from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and originally ran it out of his garage. A few years later, he built a shop at 1291 Bardstown Road, now part of Ramsi's Cafe on the World. In 2004, the company moved to a 17,000-square-foot space in an industrial park off Poplar Level Road, with enough room for workers to disassemble and rebuild entire organs in a cavernous wood shop.

Bobsin started at the company as an apprentice — or keyholder — in 1992. He moved to San Antonio in 2006 and built a successful organ company there before moving back to Louisville to buy the company, bringing along his Texas customers.

Bobsin said he grew up playing piano, but before Miller gave him a job, the only organ he had seen was a Hammond electric. But soon he was hooked, largely by the wide range of expertise required.

Designing organs and their wooden settings appeals to Bobsin's first love, architecture. Building them incorporates cabinetry, metalwork, mechanics and electronics. And, of course, the final product is a musical instrument — like Bobsin, many Miller employees are also musicians.

"It embodies all these different disciplines, which are all arts in their own right," Bobsin said. "I don't know of any field that does that so completely."
Being hooked

Bobsin sat in his office behind a desk built in the company's wood shop, its poplar top reclaimed from a tobacco warehouse on West Main Street, its legs and drawers fashioned from large wooden organ pipes.

The first organ Bobsin tuned was at the remote Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County. The chapel's organ had come on muleback in the first quarter of the 20th century. Its pipes still stand high on a lintel above the chapel's wooden door, against a stone wall.

"The tuner that I was assisting at the time didn't want to climb the ladder," Bobsin recalled. "I had been listening long enough that he was like, 'Why don't you get up there and do that for me real quick,' so I did. And that was that."

Ball confessed to being hooked the same way, his ties to the craft visible as he sat at the console at Bardstown Presbyterian after tuning the instrument.

The mechanical bellows that blow air through the organ's pipes hummed softly, out of sight, like a slumbering beast.

Ball turned to the keys and, after thinking a moment, played "Joy to the World," filling the empty church with the rich sound of the 70-year-old instrument, its several tons of steel and wood and leather a small wonder of engineering and technical know-how, giving voice to the music's transcendent grace.


Merry Christmas...

Eric
KB7DQH
The objective is to reach human immortality—that is, to create things which are necessary to mankind, necessary to the purpose of the existence of mankind, and which have become the fruit that drives the creation of a higher state of mankind than ever existed before."