S T O P - L I S T

Below is the still-evolving specification for the pipe organ I'm building. After years of scavenging, I have enough pipes and parts to produce a colorful, tonally-balanced direct-electric-action instrument (if it's in the specs below, I have it) - now I just have to find the time to build all the windchests and wire it all! I will be posting photos and measurements of the individual stops as time permits; since the instrument is presently housed in a 4-foot-high crawl-space, the designs of some of the pipe support frames I've built might be of interest to other residence-organ builders.

While I always prefer individual ranks to unification, I am realistic and have resorted to the latter as necessary to get the most bang out of the pipes I've managed to acquire; the Pedal division is particularly bad this way, having as its only independent stop a spunky 4' metal Gedeckt. The Solo division is presently made up entirely of stops borrowed from other divisions; but I think that the addition of a fourth manual for solo voices is quite useful, as it frees up these voices for solo use without restricting the use of the other stops in their home divisions. This sort of thinking leads directly to Audsley's intriguing "Orgue de Salon" concept (discussed at the very end of the second volume of his treatise The Art of Organ-Building - basically, every stop is available on every manual and in the pedal); but, as tempting as its massive combinatorial versatility may seem, the question must be raised as to the physical division of the ranks into separate swell-boxes. If one is going to set up multiple swell-boxes to allow for the expressive contrast of two or more musical voices, it seems to follow that the stops placed within each swell-box should be grouped together into useful combinations, at which point we've looped back around and are approaching the traditional multiple-division scheme that we were trying to avoid. Audsley completely avoided this issue in his discussion of the idea, and I would be quite interested to hear the opinions of the visitors of this site on this matter. At the moment I have settled for the planned specification below, although, if space and money were limitless, I would seriously think about enclosing every rank within its own swell-box, controlled by the swell-shoe corresponding to the manual to which the stop is coupled at any given time...

 

Note the renaming of the Great stops that are borrowed in the Pedal so as to keep their octave designations appropriate (the 8' Principal in the Great becomes the 8' Octave in the Pedal, etc.). I have been debating as to what extent this octave-naming convention should be used within divisions, and carried over to other, non-principal-chorus stops borrowed by the Pedal from the manual divisions: should the Swell Bourdons be called the 16' Sub Bourdon and 8' Bourdon in that division (they are unified, so is this misleading?), and the 16' Bourdon and 8' ??? (Octave Bourdon - not at all conventional) in the Pedal? I have also tried to use English names throughout, but have switched to other languages when less-important stops of a similar tone-color are present, in order to avoid confusion about unification (the Pedal division contains the Stopped Diapason from the Great, the Bourdon from the Swell, and its own independent 4' Gedeckt). What do you think?

There are, of course, other stops that I would love to include. The most down-to-earth stop wish I have at the moment is a 16' / 8' Trumpet to be used in the Swell, Solo, and Pedal divisions.

One item on my long-term project list is the construction of a complete small-scale 32' Stopped Diapason, assembled in serpentine fashion between side walls of heavy plywood, so that the individual pipe "slabs" will be stackable, with the mouths and stoppers on the same side of the slab to allow the stacks of slab-pipes to take up as little space as possible. Should this prove a success, I hope to someday use this technique to build the world's third full-length 64' stop! :)

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