Christmas - A Christmas Song

Christmas - It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas

Christmas - White Christmas

Christmas - Winter Wonderland

December 20, 2007
Here are a few Christmas tunes recorded with microphones in my organ room. The music is played with midi files and the sequencer Cakewalk. HW3 is used. The Grand Carillon is running from the MacPro (Tiger OS), four MOTU audio interfaces, and 80 speakers: one 12-speaker group, three 10-speakers groups, four 8-speaker gorups, and three 2-speaker groups. Also, the dry Litomysl organ (WIN 64 OS) is playing through my Athlon 4600+, Three M-Audio 1010LT cards, and 22 speakers (shared with the MacPro via mixers): one 12-speaker group, and one 8-speaker group. I recommend listening with good headphones. I find the Sennheiser HD 600 set to be excellent!

July 4, 2007
The Grand Carillon V 2.0 is made up of bells and plucked, and struck sounds.  The stops include three harpsichord ranks.  The harpsichord stops are from the Hauptwerk.nl website. The ranks may be downloaded there for free (as of 7-04-2007).

After playing on the two new HW2 Theatre Organs, the Connoisseur and MasterWorks, I was looking for a complimentary sound to add on my third HW2 computer. I tried my Grand Carillon V 1.0 and was so delighted with the sound, that I revised the Carillon somewhat and optimized it for live playing along with the TO's. The result is an instrument that I enjoy playing just as much as the TO's!

So, the intention is that the V 2.0 HW1 ODF is to be imported into HW2 on a computer that has multiple speaker output. I have previously only played the old Carillon in stereo from HW1. . . not a bad sound. But when I imported V 2.0 to the computer, WOW what a difference! (2 x M-Audio 1010LT cards, 7 stereo rank channels and one stereo reverb channel, using the C/C# mono to stereo split (see the Crumhorn Labs Forum for info on this sort of thing).)

Importing to HW2 Concert Edition is important since the voicing capabilities allow all the stops to be brought together just right! The result of careful "de-tuning" and volume adjusting results in a wonderful warm, full sound. And the extreme clarity afforded by the C/C# split and multiple speakers is amazing!

The new ODF has the harpsichord bypassed, in case it's not available, but info on activating it is in the ODF listing. (To run without the harpsichord, have the Mute Stop folder in the Carillon folder.)

The Carillon is now a "straight" 72-"rank" instrument. All pedal stops are now loaded separately from the manual stops. Most pedal stops are 44-notes in size to allow full range of the 4' pedal coupler. The Acoustic Bass is now called String Bass and is one octave lower than before. It can be downloaded below.

Since the Grand Carillon is loaded into HW2 as a mono instrument, the whole Carillon only takes up about 800 KB of RAM, total.

The Grand Carillon stops for download are below.
I sincerely hope the Carillon sound brings pleasure to you!!!

Bach, JS - Choral - Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring

Bach, JS - Trio Sonata #1 in Eb Major (part 1)

Boellman, L - Toccata from Gothic Suite

Couperin, Francios - Les Barricades Mysterieuses

Edelweiss

Manz, Paul - Choral - In Dulci Jubilo

Musicbox Dancer

Piano - 12^th Street Rag  (Euday Bowman - 1914)

Piano - Black Bottom Stomp  (Jelly-Roll Morton - 1926)

Piano - Bogalusa Strut

Piano - Georgia On My Mind

Piano - Shuffle

Pretty Woman

Wildwood Flower

The Grand Carillon is made up of bells and plucked, and struck sounds.  The stops include three harpsichord ranks.  The harpsichord stops are from the Hauptwerk.nl website. The ranks may be downloaded there for free.

The rest of the stops are offered here on this page for downloading. The total size is about 300 MB. The downloads consist of small .rar files of approximately 4 - 6 MB each. There are about 72 stops in the carillon. An acoustic bass is also added to the pedals. Non-tuned percussion stops are included: snare drums on the manuals and bass drum on the pedals.

The Grand Carillon Hauptwerk 1 ODF file is available as well. The Hauptwerk screen size is 1280 x 1024.

The mp3 files above give an idea of what this percussion instrument sounds like. These files should be listened to with a pair of good quality headphones for best results.

My intention is to use this carillon as a companion instrument to the Milan Virginia Theatre Organ. The HW2 TO plays through two M-Audio 1010LT sound cards while the HW1 carillon plays through a EMU 0404 card in the same computer. Running Hauptwerk I & II at the same time in the same computer works fine, but each program needs to be driven by a separate midi input. The best sound will be to use separate computers for each and divide both instruments out into eight stereo channels each!

The Grand Carillon stops for download are below.
I sincerely hope the Carillon sound brings pleasure to you!!!