Thursday, December 06, 2007

Sonic Temple


I finally dug the ol' pipe organ out of storage and mounted it on the wall of the garage. I decided against the MIDI card this time, as I don't feel like putting a computer out in the garage. I went old school and hooked up each valve to one of the keys from one of the keyboards from the dead tube organ. Anyway, it adds that homey touch to the garage, and with the speakers and amps, makes quite an imposing site.

More about the pipe organ, since there's no other information online about it - it's very small, 32 hand-built wooden pipes. I built it in 2002 or 2003, it used to have a nice case and it was hooked up to a computer so you could play tunes on it automatically. The blower is a salvage thing I got for $20, the valves are electromechanical, and the piping is PVC. It sounds more like a calliope than a proper pipe organ, and I guessed at a lot of the pipe widths, so it's somewhat uneven in sound. But it does make sound and you can play recognizable music on it, so I did what I set out to do. Impressively, there's only one jammed pipe after 2 years of the pipes sitting on the floor of the garage.