Organ Update - July 2024

It’s Alive!!!

After the better part of 14 years, this hobby project has finally taken life. In many ways it is comparable to the birth of a child, although we only had to wait nine months for those to arrive! On July 4th, 2024, the organ came to life and shook the entire house for the first time. Quite literally, the immense power from the pipes and tremulants below shake the floor, windows, mounted tvs and closed doors. I will need to apply felt to the door frames to prevent rattling. July 4th seems to be fitting too as this was my American dream. Really, I consider this instrument a gift and one that is intended to be shared. Not much about how we obtained it or how our house was constructed around it makes much logical sense, so we took that to be a sign from above and together, along with some friends, founded the Preserve Music Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to enriching lives through the assistance, support, and encouragement of music educators, performers, and students in Wisconsin. We specifically want to focus on two things to start: (1) a scholarship program for graduating high school students interested in pursuing music performance or education, and (2) an instrument program that grants instruments to those individuals or schools that cannot afford them. Among other fundraising activities, we intend to use the organ for concerts and have a free will offering to support the foundation (no pressure!). More about the foundation can be found here: https://www.preserve-music.org/

Back to the details. The post horn trem was installed and wired into the organ. Next, the remaining offsets were winded. Oh yea, and the bottles too. Once everything was on wind, it was time to prep the manual chests for pipes! This meant installing “top hats”, pins, rack boards and pipe racking. Once that was complete, it was time for the pipes! By the end of the day on July 3rd, the back (solo) chest had pipes. On July 4th, the remaining pipes were placed on the main chest. A four hour tuning session followed the pipe planting activities and it was time to make some sound! Zach Frame started playing something quiet and immediately it was noted how well the swell shutters controlled volume. Just to check volume levels (four kids and Lindsay were sleeping at the time…), I walked over to the kids rooms and quickly noticed that the varying pressure caused by the tremulants were causing the bedroom doors to rattle quite loudly. Needless to say, the organ wasn’t really opened up until the next morning. The bottles were the last thing to get tweaked. Some needed to be shimmed to speak; some needed to be tuned (add or remove mineral oil), and overall, the pressure needed to be increased. I was able to get them up to 9 inches of water column until the direct electric magnets no longer pulled in. Needless to say, the little beer bottles are quite audible now.

Of course, there is a punch list of things to resolve / issues to fix, but the organ plays. We have scheduled a dedication concert in September for all those who helped with the project (a running list is now at 33 people). On September 22nd at 2pm, we will open our doors to whomever else would like to experience the instrument. None other than Zach Frame, the one who has helped with this journey for all of these years will play the concert. Mark your calendars!