Band organ sound files

This simulator used the sound font described below and was used to make audition files which he sent to prospective customers. Band organ music wasn't put into a "chromatic" format until circa , when Mike Ames and David Wasson designed and built a system to play Mike's key Mortier organ from computer files of music rolls transcribed from all sorts of organ player rolls.

Thus a file structure resembling a pipe organ console was devised. The Mortier samples exhibit low distortion and relatively little interference from nearby reflections primarily from within the organ case.

Thus all the MIDI instruments had to be tracker bar images of the various organs which were selected as the music played. Selection was done by inserting midi patch changes according to the stop and shutter settings required. That's why they continued running Windows 98 with the Sound Blaster Live! The specific sound card product was Creative CT Both MIDI editors have a "piano roll" display which is appropriate for editing music rolls and tweaking the timing of percussion devices. But it would grow as further sound voices were added and fidelity improved.

Early in Richie began working with the jOrgan simulation environment and he experimented using FluidSynth soundfont program in lieu of the Sound Blaster card. After he became famous Rich branched out into contract arranging and developed some Marenghi sound fonts and maybe others.

Before his sudden death Rich achieved only partial success using jOrgan to play Wurlitzer roll images while emulating the Wurlitzer lock-and-cancel control system, still by inserting patch change instructions in the MIDI file at the places where lock- and-cancel instructions occurred.

Also I had developed a midi player which could play these files on Windows systems, but this player relied upon public domain GUS formatted General Midi instruments. The result was that the software could play e-rolls but sounded awful because of fundamental defects in the GUS sound font files and the poor quality of the instruments contained therein.

At this point I knew I needed some proper sound samples from a real organ so in late February I contacted the Mechanical Music Digest website with a request for someone who had a playable w to record it playing my w test roll. At that time I had heard of Rich but knew nothing about him or the existence of his band organ sound font. In fact I did not know that anyone apart from me was experimenting with the direct playing of band organ e-rolls. The font was available and I was delighted to receive a copy.

The sound font I received in early was the version in. This serves to illustrate what the individual pipes sound like at various pitches. It is played an octave higher on 16' stops. I also plan to add short sound clips that are stylistically and historically appropriate for the individual stops. The sound clips are all in MP3 format, at a bit rate of k.

Some are mono and some are stereo, depending on the sample sets from which they were produced. This lineup covers all the necessary midi variables and results in a playable midi file which makes a reasonable simulation of a style Wurlitzer Band Organ when played with General Midi GM bank 0 patches. However having experimented a bit with sound fonts I have found that Cakewalk and the sound cards available to me do not work together.

The best sound card and its software can handle sound fonts but Cakewalk is frustratingly reluctant to work with it. I have trawled the Cakewalk website looking for details of which Cakewalk versions support which sound cards. I did not find anything useful. Thus, knowing that the Brass Trumpet sound was what I needed I auditioned the entire General Midi bank 0 to find the most convincing Brass Trumpet sound.

The tenor sax won the competition. The midi velocity for every note of every instrument is saved in a midi file. Velocities translate directly to volume. Finally I have tried to automate this process using the Cakewalk CAL language but have found that in my version which is quite old it was incapable of doing anything useful. This makes it more challenging to simulate than the much simpler organs above. The benefit is that there is more variety in the music which makes it more interesting.

In order that you can realistically instrument a style organ you must first calibrate your computer's sound card using a midi patch which makes a continuous sound e.