FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Wavetable Synthesizer

Question:
Hi everyone. Wonder if someone can give me some advice, please. First some very brief information of my background: I have played a pipe organ for many years so have a good understanding of music. Professionally, I have worked in electronics and computing for 25 years so have a good understanding of both of these. However, I never combined the two but now would like to further my interests in all these fields to put together a system to synthesize a pipe organ. But where do I go - what is best - what can be done? Obviously I need a keyboard (or more than one...) and a decent sound card which has a wavetable of pipe organ sounds and facilities such as reverberation. What I do not want / need are drums, songs etc though I assume these come as part of a sound card. Is there a particular sound card which either comes with a good range of pipe organ sounds or one which would allow me to download and store on it wavetable sounds? Are there web sites that are likely to have pipe organ samples for this purpose? Ideally, I would like to have a keyboard connected to the sound card via a midi input and have a wide range of pipe organ stops which can be selected (certainly more than one at a time) by software running on the PC. Again, ideally, I would like to be able to download different sounds and load them on to the sound card to increase the available selection of sounds or, more to the point, be able to select suitable ones for my purpose. Can anyone point me in the direction of: a. a suitable sound card (Yamaha SW1000XG seems very good but will it do what I want?) b. will this sound card allow me to load sounds into its wavetable? c. web sites where sounds can be downloaded? Any advice, comments etc would be very welcome and make interesting reading. Thanks in advance,

Answer:
If you want to synthesize a pipe organ as opposed to playing back a pipe organ sample or wavetable, the Yamaha FS1r may be the way to go. Check out the review in the December 1999 Electronic Musician. They say that the FS1r does a majestic church organ that'll have you on your knees in seconds. You might want to have a look at synthesizer expanders designed for church use. One of them is at http://www.johannus.com/csmeng.html but there are others from other manufacturers. These are stand-alone devices which can be used with every MIDI capable keyboard. You should look out for the manufacturers Vicscount and Ahlborn as well.