Virginia Theatre - The Wurlitzer Recordings

     The Virginia Wurlitzer was recorded a bit differently than most of our other organ sample sets. Whereas the majority of our sets are recorded from a distance to capture original room ambiance of the instrument, we approached this recording session with a different idea in mind. Theatre organs are heavily reliant on the strong tremulants which are accurately reproduced through Hauptwerk 2. In order to effectively achieve a realistic overall sound the best approach is to record the pipes individually up close and inside the chamber to minimize or even eliminate acoustical properties of the theatre. This is known as 'dry' sampling. Since Hauptwerk 2 applies its own dedicated  tremulant models the best sound can be achieved with dry samples which effectively eliminate room acoustics in the tremulant effect. In other words, if the samples were recorded distantly with room acoustics the tremulants would also apply to the acoustics as well as the samples. This is not realistic and does not portray the proper sound we associate with theatre organs.
   

     The 'room' must be recreated with some form of reverb and in our case we chose to use impulse response reverb digitally created from a dedicated impulse response program. The program was set to model the Virginia Theatre very closely and we believe the demonstration recordings reflect an accurate sound of this organ if a similar set up were to be applied in the theatre.
     Keeping these ideas in mind you will want to think about your own room settings and how the organ will sound where you are playing. Dry samples work well in reverberant spaces, however you may also add external reverb effects for use in a close proximity to achieve the result you are after. Playing the organ without reverberation and sitting right next to the audio speakers may sound a bit unnatural since it would be equivalent to listening to the organ with your head inside the chamber. Again, this is not natural and should be avoided if at all possible.

Tremulants:

     Please be aware that the Virginia Virtual Wurlitzer DOES NOT include any samples with tremulants active. All tremulants are created through Hauptwerk 2 by use of LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) .wav files.  These LFO's were created from recordings of the real pipes with tremulant on and were edited to sound as nearly identical as possible to the original. The most important reason for achieving tremulant effects in this manner is so that we always maintain synchronization within ranks of pipes. The use of real tremmed samples will result in out of phase tremulants since it would be nearly impossible to line up the start of each tremulant cycle from note to note. Hauptwerk 2 allows you to easily switch the tremulant on and off maintaining synchronization throughout. Please click the link below  to hear an audio demonstration of the Tibia with the tremulant becoming engaged then disengaged. The first example uses the dry sample exactly as it is from the output of Hauptwerk 2. Example 2 has impulse response reverb added. Listen to how the IR accentuates the harmonics creating the throbbing Tibia sound. You will even hear the effects of oscillation while engaging and disengaging the tremulant stop. Again, all tremulant effects are done through Hauptwerk 2 using untremmed samples along with the LFO tremulant .wav data.

Tremulant Example Tibia Dry
Tremulant Example Tibia with IR Added

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