THE RESIDENCE CONSOLE

To build once own pipe organ or at least a pipe organ console, appears to be a dream of any becoming organist from the early start. Besides the aspect of discovering the craftsmanship of furniture-building and the challenge of creating all the necessary electrified equipment there are some good reasons for a professional organist and some practical aspects, too. Since Hauptwerk Software had enable the pipe organ world to use the brilliant acoustics of pipe organs around the world at home, the way of practising and concert preparing have increased rapidly. This was the starting point as well for me, to undertake a project of building my residence organ entirely on my own.

         

I had worked myself through the different options of console building, sketching the whole thing for a very long time. Yet though, discovering in the process, that my aim was actually not to construct just a large console but to create something truly unique. Since Cavaillé-Coll, there is not much space left for modern organ building developing new ideas. The amphitheatre configuration implemented such a strong icon hard to overcome. Therefore, I decided to stick more closely to the romantic configuration of German organ builders just as Wilhelm Sauer's console at Berlin Cathedral or Eule-console at Bautzen cathedral. As you can well imagine, it is from a pure technical point of view not that easy to work with draw knop stops instead of switches. That was another reason.

Berlin Cathedral	residence console with sketchUp	Bautzen Cathedral

If you look at the organ consoles, especially by Wilhelm Sauer, from a phenomenological perspective, the round gradation of the register board is already beginning to become apparent although ending with the second manual. The logical question for me then arose as to how to extend the register arrangement so that a perfect arc is created to the manuals and extends beyond the manuals. From there I created a register configuration that exists only once and was never built before matching the four manuals perfectly centred and symmetrically in a nine times nine matrix.

finished	still some work
work in progress	the early start

The stop-action is a self-made invention that took a lot of time to build, but still the result justifies any adventures. Eight soldering points per register were needed to connect the LED switches to the MIDI boards. Overall, it was a very complex job, but it worked smoothly and without errors. The resulted console is equipped with 184 electric switches with additional LED-controls including a lot more features. The challenge though, was to build not only the console but to build a study around it, that was supposed to be entirely isolated to prevent any sound from getting out of the study and to organize all the recording equipment, cameras, microphones and a DAW mixer in order to ease the process of recording videos. Check out the videos made on this page:

Gottfried Thore Drywa at his residence pipe organ

The specification of the instrument was a long-term discussion and still not yet finished completely. Once it will be done the console will be designed with the following 147 stops specification. Until then, there is any Hauptwerk sampleset playable.