The ONLY instrument with NO LIMITS

Did you know that the loudest

instrument

in the world is also the heaviest, the loudest, one of the oldest and most difficult

instrument

s in the world to play well? The pipe organ is all that and more, pushing the

limits

of any instrument in existence. I was able to experience this for the first time and in the Elon Concert Hall in Hamburg, which houses one of the most extraordinary AR organs in the world. I am not an organist, but I had the opportunity to spend time with this organ and the experience taught me as a pianist composer something that I never learned.

In the thousands of hours I've spent at the piano in this video, we'll delve into the incredible features of the organ and how it can help shape your understanding of music in a way that no other instrument or experience can in this video. conducted as part of my creative residency at Elon part one, what is a pipe organ? I was able to get the best and most direct information on organs from Philip Kly, one of the world's leading organ builders, the most important feature of a pipe organ is the pipes actually and that's what we see around us here and basically each node is created by a single pipe really the most interesting feature of a pipe organ is the separation of providing the instrument with the energy of playing the instrument Philip Kly and I met him at Piojos Hala, the other major concert hall in Hamburg, where he is currently building a new organ.

If you play a trumpet, you are producing the energy yourself. If you play a violin, you are creating the energy yourself. to produce the sound

only

the pipe organs are different there is someone who produces the energy and someone else who plays the instrument Mozart said that for him the pipe organ is the queen SL the king of instruments

only

for that reason at the beginning there was a kind of people pumping big balls for one person to have fun and three four people to work hard with big instruments in earlier times, eventually these organ blowers were replaced by electric motors, so the pipe organ can be said to be the first synthesizer or rhonic instrument of The El of the world. but this is not an impressive fact in comparison with all the other things about the organ which brings us to the second part.

So what exactly are the ends of the organ? Let's start with the sound first. The organ is the loudest unamplified instrument in the world. It can be as loud as an airplane during takeoff, it also has the widest frequency range covering sounds as low as below 20 HZ up to 16,000 Hertz, this also pushes the

limits

of what the human ear can actually hear. . These extremes make it make no sense where these organs are played, which are some of the largest cathedrals and concert halls in the world, to accommodate these spaces and also compete against the sound of a full orchestra, the organs are built to be huge and The crazy thing is that they are integrated into a building which makes the organ inseparable from the structure itself, the pipe organ is part of the building so it is like an instrument built individually for one place and it only fulfills its task in one place .

I mean, you can't take that instrument and transfer it to a different place, that means there's no real way to calculate the size of a pipe organ, but just to give you an idea of ​​the size scale we're talking about here , the heaviest organ pipe was recorded at a whopping 1675 kg, which is similar to the weight of an elephant and the longest organ pipe measures over 19 m long, which is the length of a basketball court of full size. Another extreme is how the organ is played because I am a pianist, of course, I have an advantage in terms of performance. the keyboard, but here you have to use multiple keyboards and manage the stops so far.

I don't know which stops to use these control which tubes are activated, which essentially changes the pitch of the notes you are playing by switching between higher and lower octaves. and by adding different layers of harmonics, like fifths, you can mix and match sounds to create different textures and colors, so you're basically dealing with sound design, kind of like how a producer decides which parts are played with which instrument. 16 feet is one of the lowest, so now we have like this plus the bottom W in one key, this means that you can play on a piano while you do all this, you are using your feet to play the baseline, in addition to playing the instrument itself, is a difficult task.

However, the fascinating thing about the organ is how you experience the sound in real time. This brings us to the next topic. Acoustics, part three. How playing the organ makes you a better listener. There is a saying that the most important stop on a pipe organ is the acoustics. For example, if you play very fast, what reaches the ears of the audience may be musical lines that are so dense that you can no longer read them because to repair time, so of course large churches and cathedrals have the longest ones. Concert halls with reverb time will have more clarity, but the organist still has to deal with the fact that the sound is coming from a very far distance compared to other instruments, there is so much resonance after playing the note at which I'm not used to the piano, this doesn't last long.

I think experiencing this made me play a little slower and more deliberately, where I actively listen to the sound produced with each keystroke rather than just relying on muscle memory, another thing that forced me to listen. was the fact that I had to control the start and end points of every note I played. I don't have the luxury of having a sustain pedal. It is not a keyboard instrument. I think it is, but you know what I mean. If it were a piano I'd start, but I don't really feel like doing it, it just doesn't seem appropriate so far.

I haven't had much time on the organ because also to practice on an organ you have to be in the space itself it's not something you can just practice at home or in a practice room. That said, I did experience a change in my piano playing after just a few hours of practicing on the organ during this time I was practicing this piece of mine and you can hear that the overall rhythm was faster. When I tried to play this on the organ, I immediately felt overwhelmed by all the stops and of course I didn't know how to use my feet, but as I got a little faster I got a little faster. more accustomed to the instrument I started to notice details about my playing style that I never thought about - my writing style can be quite percussive and none of that really works on the organ.

I feel that my playing has more consequences as a pianist. I'm so used to this immediate reaction time and I'm in touch with the instrument sometimes on a very physical level. I think playing the organ right now exposes some strange habits that I have on the piano that maybe work on the piano, but it's more like tactilely I can feel my way through the volume, whereas here I can do it, as much as possible. important. I began to notice a significant change in my listening. I began to understand what it felt like to hear The Sound Source coming from across the hall and how not to trust it.

Both my physical touch on the keyboard made me listen closely, listen closely, and consider the space I'm playing in instead of feeling like I'm a little sound generator in the middle of the room. I had to learn to embrace space. From the entire concert hall it's hard to put into practice how this affected my overall playing, but I noticed some subtle changes once I returned to the piano. I left more space between the sentences. I relied less on muscle memory and felt my overall feel. the rhythm was much more composed, sometimes we make the most improvements away from our main instrument, even if you don't end up playing a pipe organ, even imagining yourself playing a much more massive instrument in a very reverberant space might make you feel better . listen and play differently if you liked it check out my other videos I've been making as part of my creative residency at El FL M.

Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.