Rob Scallon
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2026
29:53 · 7.3M views · Jun 8, 2019
Rob Scallon explores a five-story pipe organ, the largest in the Midwest, with organist John Sherer. The half-hour tour covers most of the instrument and how it works.
HN recommends it as an engaging look at how an organ works as a whole orchestra, in threads about organs and live-coding them.
3 comments from Hacker News
It sounds like you don't actually know how a real organ works, which literally has different instrument groups all over the place behind the walls, with your stops controlling which instruments sound out, and your separate decks giving you additional control over which sections to play. You'll want to give this video a watch, where Rob Scallon takes us on a trip to discover how incredible these instruments are, and should highlight just how little an organ is like a piano (not even "four pianos") and how much it really is an entire orchestra.
I came across another similar video a while ago going down a YouTube rabbit hole 3am one morning. Controlling a MASSIVE pipe organ with my computer, Rob Scallon [LINK] The precursor to that video is just as if not more interesting, "Pipe Organ (An instrument the size of a building)" this video . In the video they find a midi port on the control unit. Several months later after talking to the manufacturer they go back and figure out how to get midi working and play bohemian rhapsody. It would of been an experience to be there with the size of the organ.
In addition to being thought of as a wind or keyboard instrument, there's another component to all pipe organs that makes each of them unique in a way (almost) no other instrument is - the room they are installed in. With very rare exceptions, pipe organs aren't mobile, so the acoustics of the room matter almost as much as the pipes do. Here's Rob Scallon exploring the largest pipe organ in the midwest: this video Here's a more in depth look at all the sounds of that same organ: [LINK] - this channel has documented a number of organs over the years.