[Mark Weiss]

Well I am comparing the Kurzweil format version of Post Organ Toolkit to the Akai version I bought last month.
I just received the SoundEngine version that combines Post Organ Toolkit and Post Prepared Piano.

Pretty much the same results. Some of the samples, particularly the Bavo organ, sound like they're chopped, diced and spliced and some even play a weird arpeggio if you hold the key down for more than two seconds. Just like the Akai version. I've never played a real organ that did that!
Some of the programs have pops and clicks. I still hear that pop 3.5 seconds into the Hauptwerk pedal. It's in both versions.
The simulations are much improved, but not too much else I can say.
For the extra $59, I also got the Post Prepared Piano, something that is bundled with the Organ Toolkit. "Prepared what?" As far as I can tell, it doesn't even sound like a piano. It reminds me of the awful noises that George Crumb produced for a series of albums that get all too much air play on the classical fine arts station where I have my day job. I could not find even one decent piano program that I could use. That was a complete waste of money.

I tried several of these samples in both the K2500RS and also in the K2000R. Curiously, when played in the latter instrument, there is a lot of hiss in the sound. Now if I load a Sweetwater sample, or one of the samples from the Kurzweil FTP site, there's no hiss in the K2000R. But these Post Organ and Prepared Piano samples sound like the hiss is only 20dB below the program. Very strange.

As for the organ side of this CD, I'd say about 60% of the samples are usable.
One thing I find annoying is that when a sampled pitch range ends, playing notes higher on the scale just results in the last highest pitch being played, shifted up a few cents. I would have preferred those upper keys to be silent.
There's no consistency either. Some programs play up and down a good 4-5 octaves and others only play in the first octave and then repeat notes every 3 semitones, as you go up the scale. Much short of graceful. One would have to know every program in intimate detail to make sure that when arranging a piece that none of the notes fall into these ugly regions.

From what I can tell, there's no information other than a list of the registers that were sampled and the file names, included with the documentation. THere's no mention of the range of each sample set, hence it is difficult to arrange music for organ without first undertaking the daunting task of cataloging every sample set and its playable range.

It's not the best use of $149 that I ever saw.

[69 Shades of Red]

QUOTE

Mark Weiss: \"Prepared what?\" As far as I can tell, it doesn't even sound like a piano. It reminds me of the awful noises that George Crumb produced for a series of albums that get all too much air play on the classical fine arts station where I have my day job. I could not find even one decent piano program that I could use. That was a complete waste of money.

Mark, I am not familiar with these sample CDs, but I am familiar with prepared pianos. In high school I was very much into avant-garde music, and would get together with classmates and make alegoric music. That included prepared pianos. I even wrote a piece, called "Halucinations" for prepared piano and percussion, for 20th century music marathon that we would organize every year. I had put a crash cymbal on the lowest strings, among other things (coins, rubber strips and such in the upper octaves). I was told after the performance, and once I started banging on those lower keys with both arms, one of the piano teachers had jumped from her seat in sheer terror So I guess it had the intended effect. eek! Ahh, those were fun days

The thing is, once you start jamming coins, screws, bolts, rubber strips and whatnot, the piano completely stops sounding like a piano. For example, sliding a dime (a dime because it's the perfect size) between the three strings gives you a bell-like sound. Rubber strips give you a muted plucked sound and so on. So just by the sound of it I wouldn't expect to hear "real" piano sounds. From what you describe, you got what is advertised, samples of a prepared piano. So take it for what it is. Probably would come in handy for special effects BTW do they have a description of how the piano was "prepared"?

George

[clif marsiglio]

Honestly, prepared piano IS exacty what it says. If you find a decent piano patch on there that is useful for regular playing -- it ain't prepared. Prepared is the word John Cage used for his technique of setting up his pianos...

This is a big reason to listen to the MP3s listed on the site...you would have heard instantly that these are not normal pianos.

As for the organs -- a lot of these are based on real organs. As such, different stops relate to different physical pipes or whistles or otherwise. You will find a lot of these playing WAY past the point of where the physical note ends. Personally, I don't like this sort of thing -- I want realism. Unfortunately -- and I've found this out doing a lot of programming / editing for others -- most people would rather have it extend into the unreal range so that they don't get silence OR so they don't feel cheated when their 88 Note keyboard only plays 30 notes for a specific program. We recently had someone come here and complain that Pyramid's programs were pretty much garbage because they didn't sample ALL of the Melotron -- and when we asked what he meant, he was complaining that they only sampled 56 notes of the keys (Melotrons were physically limited to 56 notes)...he then proceeded to say how much like shit these were because there were no special programs on here -- no duh! They were intended to be EXACT reproductions of the old ones...and then complained about the source samples -- even the master tapes were limited in their ability

The point is, if you appease one side, the other side is going to feel cheated. So its up to the person programming it -- do you want realism OR do you want playability.

As for the Arp sounds -- yeah some of the bass patches do sound a little like that. I've heard the source recordings and the source had a lot of low frequency warble to them as well. It has to do with the physical size of the pipe, the standing waves, the size of the room and all sorts of other things. its how it sounds in person too if you were to listen to these organs.

I just remember almost 10 years ago when Michiel sent me his first demos on this -- he was working as an assistant theatre director and wanted to capture the sounds of a pipe organ that he had access to as part of his day job. He sent the demos and I sent som of the same concerns as you did on some of the things like the bass, in which he sent back some of the source recordings and in all honesty, he did a great job of capturing this stuff. Real organs have quirks. Most organists know about the quirks and they learn to play around them...organists have a LOT more freedom than people think. Check out some of Bach's organ scores one of these days (the originals, not the updated ones) -- they will show whole passages in almost a code where the organist is supposed to 'fill in the blanks' -- he'd supplied the intro, several main passages, the themes and feeling -- he felt that the organist needed to fill in the rest. In a sense, it is almost like the Nashville notation where session players show up and get a chart of whats going on BUT it really tells you nothing if you aren't use to that style playing. Bach knew that organists needed and thats what he gave them.

As for being the same between Kurzweil and Akai -- yeah -- *THIS* stuff is mostly the same. There are several directories with VAST emulations of the organs he'd provided so that if you needed ultra clean organ (as opposed to realistic) OR if you needed to conserve on sample memory (I believe he was doing this on a 2000 at the time -- 64 Megs at most -- if you were rich enough to afford it), those were there in synthesis.

I wouldn't judge all Akai vs. Kurz things like this. There was an attempt to give the Kurzweil guys a little extra. The Prepared piano used a lot of layer tricks that couldn't be done in Akai (but still sound like the base samples)...there are differences in the articulation. Personally, for Organ -- I could care less what format its in as its not like the stuff is velocity sensative or requires much of anything.

So I'm NOT disagreeing with you on this stuff...I'm just throwing another perspective out there from someone that saw the creation of this product and did some beta testing on it. Not everything was perfect, but it was a solid product.

clif

[Mark Weiss]

Just a short note on the Post Organ stuff...

I read all of the points here, but I think that some of this is NOT normal, as these sound like sampling glitches.

I've posted four examples of pitch problems, sampling glitches, hiss and phantom arpeggios here:

http://www.dv-clips.com/Organ%20Tests.htm

See if you don't notice the problems.

I'll follow up on the piano stuff later.. I've got a dinner engagement to attend now.

[freddynl]

Just a small question Mark,
You are writing about a sample called bavo organ?
I am a very curious to this one as I live in Haarlem, Netherlands where we have the bavo organ!
(in the bavo church by the way) Is this a sample from our "bavo organ???

thks for letting me know,
Fred

[clif marsiglio]

Any possible way to put those up in MP3 or any other universal open format?

I just won't deal with Real Audio as all the installer put spyware on the system that you never can tell what its doing -- and occasionally screws with the resources when you least expect it.

[SCP]

QUOTE

freddynl: Just a small question Mark, You are writing about a sample called bavo organ? I am a very curious to this one as I live in Haarlem, Netherlands where we have the bavo organ! (in the bavo church by the way) Is this a sample from our \"bavo organ??? thks for letting me know, Fred

Yes, that is where the samples are from.

Regards,

SCP

[Mark Weiss]

Clif, I'd have preferred MP3 too, but with all the terrible litigation that the RIAA here in America has been throwing at ISPs, many of them block the transfer of anything .MP3 on their servers. I found that they do not block .RAM and .RM yet, so I was able to put these examples up in RealMedia format. Thanks to the RIAA lawyers, we cannot use MP3 in the USA.

Fred,
Yes, apparently that is the Bavo organ which you are familiar with. If you get this toolkit CD, you would be in a unique position to compare the sounds with the real thing.
The Bavo sounds are quite suited to some of the works of Charles-Marie Widor. The Bavo has some of the tonal characteristics of the organ of Saint Sernin in Toulouse, France.

My wife's here reading over my shoulder and she remarked that if you're near this organ, can you take a photo with a digital camera and e-mail it to us? :-)

George,
Goodness, I hope that you are not THE George Crumb that Joanne Moryll on WMNR frequently plays the works of! Even so, I hope you'll not be too offended by my frankness. I just don't understand the younger generation's ideas on music.

I'm doing a little tweaking of some of the samples and found that I can get an extra octave out of the high end by simply switching on Sample skipping in the keymap edit menu. But still, these samples that have a range to D9, should play past D5, one would think.

Clif,
A few of the samples don't seem to cover the real range of the pipes sampled. But who knows. The documentation doesn't get into the ranges of the samples. And even so, the cutoff should be built into the program. It is as easy as edit..keymap..edit..sample.. and dialing in the upper limit to a point where the sample is not being stretched past the 96Khz sample rate ceiling of the Kurz.

I deleted and reloaded the Bavo samples later this evening and found that although I still have the pitch problems, some of the weirdness with the Cor de Nuit 2 sample has vanished. Perhaps the Kurz has difficulty reliably loading sample sets this large. I'm going to try reloading some other sets as well.

I haven't been able to remedy the tick sound that happens 2.818 seconds into the Hauptwerk stop's lowest range sample though. I can see the spike in the sample editor. Perhaps I can export the sample, clean up the glitch in SoundForge and reload it and save the KRZ file. One would think that Post would have done this before releasing the toolkit though.

Well it's late and we've got to be up early to march in a parade Sunday morning in New York, so I'll pick this up tomorrow.

[Steve Mac]

QUOTE

Mark Weiss: Clif, I'd have preferred MP3 too, but with all the terrible litigation that the RIAA here in America has been throwing at ISPs, many of them block the transfer of anything .MP3 on their servers. I found that they do not block .RAM and .RM yet, so I was able to put these examples up in RealMedia format. Thanks to the RIAA lawyers, we cannot use MP3 in the USA.

Hi Mark...
Hey, I hate to disagree but the RIAA has absolutely nothing against MP3s.

http://www.musicunited.net/7_faq.html
What is your position on MP3s?
We think MP3 technology is a great thing—as long as it’s used legally and properly.

What they are against is copyright infringement, especially on P2P networks.

They are now going after the Instant messaging function of these networks to send out warnings to potential music pirates.
http://www.riaa.com/News_Story.cfm?id=634

I am unsure how particular ISP providers are reacting to whatever recent legislation that's been passed, but I'm sure in the US, a blanket denial by an ISP provider that prohibits the transfer of a "legal" MP3 format file would end up in a first amendment, civil liberties lawyer's hands pretty quick.

[clif marsiglio]

How about putting them in MP3 and then renaming them .MOV? -- Quicktime SHOULD be able to recognize this.

OR Zipping them up...honestly, I'll never hear a damn thing as long as its in .ram -- which sucks because as one point, I actually had a fully licensed Real Server for my university work -- once they started in with the spyware, we had to stop using it at the university because I was using this for doing things like sending audio for foreign language testing and legally we couldn't allow ANYTHING to be retransmitted that had to do with out testing...and then personally, when I kept having clients computers crap out temporarity and we traced it to resources in play by Real Player, I stopped using it in studio situations.

Its not a bad format, its just because of their politics and forms of making money (I was willing to pay for this software -- and did) I can no longer use it -- and many many many others are in the same situation....

[saul2600]

QUOTE

Mark Weiss: Goodness, I hope that you are not THE George Crumb that Joanne Moryll on WMNR frequently plays the works of! Even so, I hope you'll not be too offended by my frankness. I just don't understand the younger generation's ideas on music.

George Crumb was born in 1929... i suppose he is younger than Mozart... but...

Seriously, though, you are not the only person who has difficulties with the avante-garde, 20th century modern music, serial and aleoric music, etc... so worry not. (as for myself, i was awed by the soundscapes of Gyorgy Ligeti in the film 2001... the frightening wind-like requiem...)

on the other hand, it would be very hard for any sound designer to assemble a cd-rom of Prepared Piano that you would like; it's nearly a monumental task just to prepare it and sample it well.

good luck with tweaking the organ to taste,

[Mark Weiss]

Steve,
You're correct, however, ISPs in the US have exerted a blanket ban on any file format that can carry potential copyrighted material. Just try to upload an MP3 file to a commercial FTP server and you'll see what I mean.
We had to apply for and obtain special permission to host RealMedia files on our rented server, as this was originally against terms of service. We sent them a sworn statement attesting to the ownership of all the media content we'd be making available--that's how we got .ram/.rm file uploads unblocked.

Clif,
While your suggestion to zip or rename files may work, we find it would be extremely inconvenient for the average visitor to our site. We want to make it as easy as possible to view or hear the content.
I agree that there is some advert-ware in Real player, but that can easily be disabled by deleting some files it installs in its folder. I've never run into a system performance issue with Real|Player on a Windows machine. I can't comment on the Mac OSX version, as I stopped using the Mac extensively after System 8.

Saul,
Yes, indeed George was born during the 'modern' music era, and a lot of atonal, or antiphonal music started to appear. Marcel Dupré, who managed to last early into the 20th century, is about as modern as I go. :-)

Now this 'prepared piano' is quite 'dead' sounding. The only sample that even remotely sounds useful is the scrape. It sounds like the soundtrack effects for a horror movie. I recall that an instrument called the Lyra (an 8' diameter, hexagonal-shaped wooden contraption with piano strings) was made expressly for this kind of sound.
At any rate, I can't see an organist having a good use for 'prepared piano'. I'd have felt much better about the purchase had a couple of good concert grand samples been included. Of course it would be best to give the buyer the choice NOT to be forced to buy piano samples when he wants organ samples.

I'm slowly finding some workarounds, but honestly, I shouldn't have to do programming myself to fix the incompatibilities between the toolkit and the Kurz. I did find that a simple way to squeak another octave the deficient samples was to turn on 'sample skipping'. Why Michiel Post didn't think of that, I can't imagine.
Many samples suffer from the harmonic content changing abruptly where one sample ends and another begins. This effect is very audible to me during normal playing with the Bavo samples. Less so with the Baroque samples. I found I could soften the transition by applying a low pass filter at about 6000hz to the set with alg #1. This kills some of the harmonic content in the natural range of the samples, but it effectively brings it to the level of the pitched sample above it.
But again, I shouldn't have to do this much programming. There are a lot of samples on this CD and reprogramming all of them could take several evenings!

[clif marsiglio]

As a former ISP owner (you can probably still see what remains of my old company at http://onthecircle.com -- I shudder at what it looks like these days -- its turned into banner ghetto last time I looked at it when the current owners decided to make it look 'active'), I'd say that ANY ISP that doesn't allow you to post content on your site is one that you need to get away from.

Even 5 years ago, I would make clients sign a document stating ANYTHING they had on their site was of their copyright OR they had written permission to host it. If it was a 'rented' server (or colo'd) we didn't ask a damn thing -- it was their box to do with what they wanted within the scope of the bandwidth. Our policy was that if we got a warrent to shut things down, we'd do it -- if the client wanted to fight it, they needed to get the injunction to keep it up. We had SEVERAL attempts from folks to have files removed from lawyers and law enforcement, but as long as it wasn't a court order -- screw it, we ignored the shit.

Honestly, its no ones business what type of files you serve. In this case, you are limiting the audience of those that can read this media. I don't know about the rest of your business, but I personally won't be listening to these .rm files and thus any other comments on the sounds of the file will be ignored by me.

As for useful sounds in the Prepared Piano -- there was a bank that never made it to the set. I specifically asked Michiel to sample some bass 'thumps' for me. On my own piano, I play with the lid open and even color coded the strings with white-out so I could play with either hammers or just my fingers. A nice solid finger thump with the sustain down is one of the most soulful sounds I'd ever discovered (heh! I attempted to sample these myself, but the studio got VERY upset when I started poking around their Yamaha concert grand between sets ). I kinda wished he'd dropped these in because I found them very useful.

As for Sample Skipping -- this wasn't available on the Kurzes when these were released

Anywho, I hope your reprogramming gives ya something you find useful...I reprogram EVERYTHING I get as I'm never satisfied with the base programs. Heck, I've thought about at times putting a part of our Kurzweil Section (being revamped right now -- we actually took down the link til its up again) where folks can upload tweaks to sample CDs and stuff...

clif

[Mark Weiss]

Hi Clif,

How old is the K2500? I thought it came out several years before Post Organ Toolkit (the press was talking about it in late 1998, while I heard the K2500 dates back to '95). If so, sample skipping was around for some time before Post Organ Toolkit.
I was under the impression that I had paid for Kurzweil-specific programming of the samples. Had I known this was not the case, I would have stayed with the Akai version.
But in the interest of expediency, I'm reprogramming the sample sets that I need for certain projects on a first-need basis. I will probably end up providing feedback to SoundEngine.com's people about fixing these glitches.
Granted, the majority of the samples are fantastic. I'm just a perfectionist who's too familiar with the sound of the great concert organs and when I hear something that deviates from what is burned into my memory, it really is a jarring experience for me.

[freddynl]

QUOTE

Mark Weiss: Fred, Yes, apparently that is the Bavo organ which you are familiar with. If you get this toolkit CD, you would be in a unique position to compare the sounds with the real thing. The Bavo sounds are quite suited to some of the works of Charles-Marie Widor. The Bavo has some of the tonal characteristics of the organ of Saint Sernin in Toulouse, France. My wife's here reading over my shoulder and she remarked that if you're near this organ, can you take a photo with a digital camera and e-mail it to us? -) . [/QB]

Hello Mark,

Well I don't have a decent digital camera, but I thought there should be something on the web, so indeed there's really a lot, so just click on the links below and you get pictures and technical info.

Will have a look into the toolkit cd :)but probably not sooner as october/november this year.
(I'm in the middle of a reconstruction of the topfloor of our house which contains my hobby room and a new projected sauna/bathroom)

take care,
Fred


http://home.pi.net/~marcel.tettero/Bavo.html

http://home.hetnet.nl/~aehrenburg/schedule...%20Muller-orgel

http://www.josvanderkooy.com/nl.htm
(click left on foto’s)

http://www.josvanderkooy.com/disphaarlem.htm
(technical details with a small english text)

http://www.orgelland.nl/orgels/default.htm
(index for famous or unique organs in the Netherlands)

[Mark Weiss]

Thank you for posting the links for the photos, Fred!
Very interesting stuff indeed, including some details of the ranks. Indeed, the largest organ in the world for some time. Impressive!

Do you know of the Concertgebouw organ as well? That's another organ also included in the Organ Toolkit CD. There may be a mix of other organs in there too, but these two were mentioned by name. The Concertgebouw is a major concert hall, but the organ gets little or no mention on their web site.

Thanks again for the fascination links!

[clif marsiglio]

Cool as heck Fred

Mark -- not everyone has access to the latest greatest hardware the minute it comes out. Again, your concerns are valid -- I was just pointing out things from a point of view from someone that saw part of the construction of these samples -- Michiel use to be a forum member a LONG time ago and would throw some of us new and different things he was working on (I have a few things -- I think it was MP -- that never got released, but were still cool as hell ). Thats all I'm trying to do...not invalidate what you've said...

[Mark Weiss]

Clif,
Are you referring to the digital camera photo request? I thought they were pretty ubiquitous nowadays.
It's a shame Michiel Post isn't here in this group to this day. I'm sure we would have many engrossing discussions about a mutual passion: concert organs.
But regardless of the nice job sampling, I can't get over the quality control issues.
I spent quite a bit of time this evening, surgically dissecting the Hauptwerk stop program. I traced the bad sample to a C2 right sample, 1.9 seconds in, a negative-going spike of about 1mS duration. This can be seen on my organ test page:
http://www.dv-clips.com/organ%20Tests.htm

I fixed it, reimported the sample carefully and resaved the program and dependants to disk on the K2500RS. Kurzweil sure makes it a tedious task to locate objects and save them on several levels, but the task is done now.
To test it out, I played Dupre's "Carillon" Op 27 Nr. 4, with heavy emphasis on the pedal parts and this time it sounded perfect with no annoying pops and ticks. It has been a great learning experience, but I still would have preferred it if this quality control work were included in the price of the disk. ;-/

[clif marsiglio]

No -- I was refering to the fact not everyone has access to the latest greatest technology -- you pointed out that K2500 was available back in the days that the Post Organ disc was released. Heck, until a year ago, *I* was still on my K2000 -- as well as some of the top Kurzweil programers are STILL using this technology solely.

As with any CD, there will be a time constraint and otherwise to be considered with the price. At the time this was released, all the other CDs were selling for $300. He was selling his for CD for MUCH less than the other guys as it was his first project -- and it was a bit of a learning project. In the project, he ended up recruiting several professional organists that wanted realism in their sounds and the response was outstanding front them...sometimes realism means you get a little dirt in the mix occasionally.

As for the C2Right sample...good job on the picts...finally something I can see I wonder how hard this would be to edit in CoolEdit / Peak / Whatever and draw the waveform in without the click. I'll have to pull out my Post disc sometime and find this sample and see what needs to be done as it SHOULD be pretty simple if you have the tools (not everyone has these, nor should they).

clif

[Steve Mac]

QUOTE

Mark Weiss: Steve, You're correct, however, ISPs in the US have exerted a blanket ban on any file format that can carry potential copyrighted material. Just try to upload an MP3 file to a commercial FTP server and you'll see what I mean.

I have 500mB set up at www.readyhosting.com .
I can ftp up any mp3 I've created to this site.
It's the only reason I have started the site.
Go ahead, download an mp3 at my site, it's perfectly legal!!!

www.steevee.com