Screenshot of Piteå School of Music sampleset main console

As a professional organist I must voice my opinion that no virtual organ can compete with a good, well regulated tracker organ. To really develop a good touch one must play the real thing, otherwise it's hard to understand attack/release and to feel how the pallet is opened by the playing finger.

Nevertheless it's impractical for most persons to have a real organ at home and it's in such situations that a virtual organ can be very valuable. Not the least important reason is that, even if it's available at only a fraction of the cost of a real organ, it can sound very convincing indeed.

My hopes are that vpo's and my efforts with them will help more people enjoy the wonderful instrument that the Organ really is.

Welcome to my VPO site!

My virtual pipe organ setupHi and welcome to my Virtual Pipe Organ site! Here I'll share my experience about setting up a Virtual Pipe Organ mainly on the Linux platform. The sample sets I've created for GrandOrgue can also be found and freely downloaded here, as well as documents of my experience from creating the sample sets.

Even if I'd like to have a real tracker organ at home it's simply not possible at the moment due to both space and economy. But as a professional organist I need to be able to practice at home on both manuals and pedal. Enter the Virtual Pipe Organ!

As I'm by choice using Linux as my main computer platform the excellent (but not free) virtual pipe organ software Hauptwerk cannot really come into question. (Yes, I've managed to install the limited free/trial version in Wine on Ubuntu but the performance was horrible) Instead there's a very good free (gnu/gpl) alternative named GrandOrgue (available both for Windows and Linux) that I'm using.

There's still the option to get the old MyOrgan 1.0.6 working both in Windows and in Linux via Wine and WineAsio (try to find it on www.jeuxdorgues.com if you're interested), but the future is definitely (in my opinion) in GrandOrgue. The new features that at the moment only can be tested with custom compilations of the development trunk really makes this software stand out as the best free VPO software avaliable! Hopefully we'll have a new official release coming soon.

To have a virtual pipe organ at your home you'll need a few things:

  • A computer with a virtual pipe organ software running - eg. GrandOrgue
  • MIDI keybord(s) and a MIDI pedal
  • A sampleset to load into the virtual pipe organ software

Then to refine your setup you'd likely want to have good speakers and a nice console to be comfortable playing your virtual pipe organ.

I'll try to describe how I have set up my virtual pipe organ in theese pages and also give some general remarks that I hope will be useful for other people that want to be able to play organ at home.

  Thu, 09/02/2010 - 12:58 - Lars Palo