Konzerthaus Organ

This is truly a first: The Vienna Instruments Collection Vienna Konzerthaus Organ is the first sampled organ recorded in a concert hall, not in a church, thus blending perfectly with orchestral performances. Obviously, it is also the first instrument not recorded at the Silent Stage, and yet it adheres to Vienna’s overall sampling concept since it has been captured in exactly the same space that provides the essential impulse responses for their revolutionary MIR reverberation and mixing engine. That space is the venerable Great Hall of the “Wiener Konzerthaus”, where the famous “Rieger Organ” was installed in 1913.

The Vienna Konzerthaus Organ Collection includes 14 GB of stereo samples covering three manuals with 38 single stops and one pedal with 18 single stops. The user can put together his own registrations by combining the stops in the Vienna Instruments’ user interface, retaining the flexibility of this magnificent instrument. In addition, organ experts were invited to create a wealth of pre-recorded registrations that present the user with the most important and best sounding combinations. Of course these registers can be easily extended to the user’s needs or taste. There are also isolated samples of the valves of each register as well as two minutes of room noise and the wind-chest idling, so the user can add these elements to the mix for even more realism.

Since the Rieger Organ had been equipped with MIDI technology a few years ago, the Vienna team developed some new recording and editing approaches. Because of the exactly defined length of the MIDI notes, they had the chance to distinguish between the different reverb trails emanating from short or long notes. This is important because several ranks (especially the very deep ones) take up to a second to unfold their full power, so the release samples of short notes can sound very different from long notes. Using the underlying MIDI data they could also recreate the authentic latency behavior of each flute. The different latencies also represent the spatial arrangement of the flutes, providing another reason why the three-dimensional recreation of this organ sounds so authentic.