Litomysl-Hauptwerk Organ Project

The aim of the project is to make the concert organ from Litomysl (Grygar, 2001) available for the Hauptwerk software sampler. This modern organ is large enough (4 manuals + pedal, 51 sounding stops) to fit the needs of any organ music style, early Spanish music, French or German romantic music, German baroque, XXth century music or anything else you can imagine.

The organ was sampled very accurately on 1:1 basis using professional digital equipment of the 24bit/48kHz resolution.  Each tone of each stop has been captured several times to assure the best possible results. Long samples up to 9 seconds were taken.

Ambiental recording was employed to get the "wet" samples, mics were placed some 13 m apart from the instrument using the stereo O.R.T.F. norm, suspended high in the air (in the height of the prospect pipe mouths). This ensures very detailed and present sound while the acoustics of the building are preserved very faithfully.

The "dry" samples were captured using the close-up recording technique with one mono microphone placed near to pipe mouth (30 cm - 1,2 m). The distance varied slightly since it was not possible to get so close to every pipe of the instrument.

The results are now available converted to the following formats:

• Hauptwerk 1 (or MyOrgan)  - 16 bit/44.1kHz
• Hauptwerk 3 (suitable for Hauptwerk 2 as well)   24 bit/48kHz,

each having one or several loops and the release point. It can be used immediately by the Hauptwerk software or may be converted to almost any other sampler format (Giga, Kontakt, Halion, PowerSampler...)

To be able to get the most out of this organ set you should use high quality headphones. I personally like AKG K-501 or AKG K-240, but sometimes I use closed Sennheiser HD-280 Pro when I need to filter the noise of the ambient during hearing. Others have said to me that it was also very satisfying with some Beyer Dynamics. Alternatively, quality (studio) monitors or hi-fi speakers could be used. The dry sample set can be used also in reverberant spaces, especially when using multi-channel reproduction. In any case, listening to the organ (even the mp3 demos) with cheap PC speakers will not give good results... the louder sound may appear rather dull or rumbling.

The idea behind this project is to make a high quality sample set available to every Hauptwerk user. Therefore, the price is set so that every Hauptwerk user may afford it.