Piston Settings

I play two Allen theatre organs organs on a regular basis (LL324 and my Q311sp) and have tried to keep their pistons the same so I do not get confused. I thought this was kind of cheating... until I listed to Walt Strony on the ATOS/Allen theatre organ DVDs. He said that he tries to set up the pistons of all the theatre organs he plays in the same general layout.

After listening to he DVDs and having used (and modified) my piston set up for almost two years, I have some up with one set of pistons (for my memory on the Bristol Glen LL324 and my 311 at home.) It is a combination of my tastes along with Walt Strony & Simon Gledhill suggestions from the DVDs.

It took a while to tweak settings on my organ at home (in the meantime I discovered one of my pistons was not working correctly) and I thought I had it set up fine on the LL324. Well, after playing my usual Wednesday night concert there, I had several sound balance problems. Yesterday I went over to Bristol Glen with my usual type of music and I worked hard for about an hour on the pedal/accomp/great/solo balances. Hopefully this will is the way I like it for when I play my usual pre-movie concert next Wednesday night at Bristol Glen.

Ray Bohr & the Radio City Music Hall Organ

I was excited when I finally found a CD of Ray Bohr at the RCMH organ on Amazon.com of all places. Unfortunately, it is a terrible recording. It has the up-front-in-your-face recording of George Wright recordings with none of the quality of his recording. I think it was miked from inside the chambers. If you see the recording, do not get it.

Bach Fake Book

Yup, you read that correctly! I was searching for an arrangement of "Come Sweet Death" that I could play when I found the "Bach Fake Book" published by Cherry Lane. It is interesting to improvise from. It would also be good if one was trying to make arrangement (perhaps for choir) out of one of Bach's tunes. Each piece has a lead line (sometimes intermixed with a second part .. after it was originally polyphonic music.) Many of the chords also have other bass notes than the first inversion of the chord.. for example Fm7/Ab. It may be something you want to look at.