The King of Instruments showing itself in most unlikely places

[KB7DQH]

First is a typical upcoming concert announcement type story so familiar to this forum due to my best efforts ;D  but one must understand that Google didn't pick it up from the original source nor the news service which picked it up, but,  by MENAFN.com...  which is an abbreviation for Middle East North Africa Financial Network...  A concert taking place in Tucson, Arizona oddly enough...

http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?storyid=%7Be659c92c-b7ae-4926-a106-21a78f57228a%7D

And then a discussion got started on a Wooden Boat Forum :o

http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthread.php?139783-Pipe-Organ-How

Beginning with...

I enjoy old classical music, especially on traditional instruments.
Pipe organs are unpossible. See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FXoyr_FyFw

How in hell can anybody master the playing of such a complex instrument? And who/how was it designed and built?

I'm a test pilot and have tested some pretty complex and complicated aircraft, and I cannot imagine mastering the art of playing a big pipe organ, let alone designing and building one.

Tom

(What Tom does not seem to know is that  a number of airplane pilots happen to be accomplished organists ;)

And some more recollections by those who responded to the above post... the following I found quite amusing ;)

While making the film about Loews theater in Syracuse we realized that we needed film of the interior of the pipe organ; most particular we wanted to show "the toy box," the collection of drums, whistles, bells and so forth which were available to the organist. However, it was impossible to get into the organ loft at Loews with our cameras and lights. But then we were told of an organ enthusiast who had a theater organ in his home in North Syracuse, and he agreed to have us drop by and film while he played.

The console was in his living room, but most of the organ pipes were in his basement. A few of the long pipes were located in concrete trenches in his back yard. When he played "The Entrance March of the Gladiators" the whole neighborhood shook. In his basement those of us on the camera crew couldn't hear one another shout--probably explains my tinnitus today, except for the cap and ball firearms.

We asked the gentleman if his neighbors ever objected to his late-night improvisations on his theater organ.
"No," he explained, "By a total coincidence the neighbors on both sides are deaf."

And this one has alluded to something that has been rattling around in the back of my gray matter for quite some time and I will likely expand upon some of the concepts in a more appropriate board on this forum....

I met John Brombaugh at his request probably 30 years ago....in Eugene of course. He was interested in test and audio measurement equipment, but we/he rather quickly figured out that what I had (at the time) wouldn't allow him to do the sorts of fine measurements he needed for his purposes, so as far as I know, he continued to tune his instruments by ear. Not many years later, using the principle of FFT (the Fast Fourier Transform) a whole slug of new acoustic test instruments landed on the scene, and a few years after that, most of the math to accomplish very finite resolution could be purchased for fractions of the original costs and be loaded into a laptop computer, so perhaps John now can verify his instruments' performance with great precision. But honestly, I don't think he really needed (or needs) an FFT based analysis system because I was convinced, having met him just that once, that he knew more than enough about how to move air through pipes to last him for a lifetime of production. I imagine he's all the better prepared for his tasks today, so many years on.

His shop was as you say David, really interesting, and if I recall, he worked pretty much alone.

Keep in mind the word "worked"... John Brombaugh has now retired from the construction of pipe organs, but still does consulting from time to time...

There are photographs in the thread linked to above including some Australian "Fairground" organs!

Eric
KB7DQH

[Contrabombarde]

I must say it never ceases to amaze me how the grand organ at Birmingham Town Hall made a cameo appearance in the final Harry Potter film, on the gallery of the dining room at Malfoy Manor: