One of a kind

This is truly a first: The Vienna Konzerthaus Organ is the first sampled organ recorded in a concert hall, not in a church, thus blending perfectly with orchestral performances. Obviously, it is also the first instrument not recorded at the Silent Stage, and yet it adheres to our overall sampling concept since it has been captured in exactly the same space that provides the essential impulse responses for our revolutionary Vienna MIR Pro 3D reverberation and mixing engine. That space is the venerable Great Hall of the “Wiener Konzerthaus”, where the famous “Rieger Organ” was installed in 1913.

The Vienna Konzerthaus Organ Collection includes 14 GB of stereo samples covering three manuals with 38 single stops and one pedal with 18 single stops. You can put together your own registrations by combining the stops in the Vienna Instruments player, retaining the flexibility of this magnificent instrument. In addition, we have invited experts to create a wealth of pre-configured registrations that present you with the most important and best sounding combinations. Of course these registers can be easily extended to your needs or taste. There are also isolated samples of the valves of each register as well as two minutes of room noise and the wind-chest idling, so you may add these elements to the mix for even more realism.

Since the Rieger Organ had been equipped with MIDI technology a few years ago, we were able to develop some new recording and editing approaches. As we could exactly define the length of the MIDI notes, we had an opportunity to distinguish between the different reverb tails emanating from short or long notes. This is important because several ranks (especially the very deep ones) take up to a second to unfold their full power, so the release samples of short notes can sound very different from long notes. Using the underlying MIDI data we could also recreate the authentic latency behavior of each flute. The different latencies also represent the spatial arrangement of the flutes – another reason why our three-dimensional recreation of this organ sounds so authentic.