My beloved reed organ...

Every day I discover new details about my reed organ. When I pull out all the shutter stops together with Echo Horn and Dulcet (stops no. 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10) the colour of the tone is surprisingly similar to a real pipe principal sound, with the characteristic whistling sound. I believe that the reed cells are made this way to create wind "noise" when the shutters are opened. When the shutters are closed, the sound is nothing like a principal, but a clean, round, pleasant-to-the-ear sound.

Another thing I've noticed is that the organ needs to be "warmed up" to be in tune. That means I have to let all the reeds sound for a few seconds, or play it with all the stops out for a couple of minutes, before everything is in tune. It seems like the reeds go stiff after not being used for a while and need some stretching and bending to get back in shape. (added later: The organ stays in tune if I leave all the stops out when it is not in use, so that air can circulate inside the instrument).

The only down-side to this reed organ (not that much of a down-side, but still) is that the 16' stop does not go deeper than the usual pipe organ, even though it has got 7 extra keys in the bass region compared to a standard pipe organ. The positive side is that these 7 tones does not borrow from the octave above or another stop, but are 7 uniqe reeds with a pitch that is one octave above of what you would expect. Thus, the power of the sound does not get that much degraded because the F1 adds to the F2 creating a louder sound (having the same pitch). Anyway, the C2 is so deep that the sound board together with the organ case have a hard time giving enough resonant support to the low frequency of approx. 32 Hz that is the fundamental frequency of C2.

I had no idea that a reed organ like this would be so much fun to play. When I play with all the stops out the sound is almost unpleasantly loud, even though I intend to play loudly. When I play with only Dulcet and Echo Horn pedalling gently, the sound is so soft and quiet. It is amazing that this instrument sounds and plays so well after 106 years of playing, Norwegian temperature and humidity fluctuations, children growing up, moved from one room to another, from one house to another.

Since no music I've got is written for split keyboard, I have to compensate by playing e.g. an octave lower in the bass, ommiting some tones, playing some tones an octave higher and so on. In this way some music does not sound so well, while other music sounds perfectly OK. I admit that I miss the possibility to play with my feet, because most of the music I have played on the pipe organ is totally dependant on the pedals. This music is not possible to play on the reed organ without transcribing it. I doubt it is worth the effort. A much better idea is to write completely new music for this specific instrument. In fact, I am half way finished with my first piece of music which will demontrate the variety of the instrument.