The Tabernacle Organ 101

I think it's interesting to realize that before the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s that the two most complicated inventions or products of human engineering were the clock and the pipe organ and it's still a very complex instrument but it's easy to understand if you break it down into its its components a pipe organ basically has three main components you've got the wind source just like our lungs which in most cases these days is an electric blower it's just like a giant fan this organ has three of those it has two down in the basement in a room that's air-conditioned and humidified and that helps preserve the organ and also keeps the tuning stable then there's a third blower up in the balcony for the pipes that are that the East End of the Tabernacle then those are connected by large wind lines to boxes that are sitting underneath the pipes and that's the second component of the organ the pipes and the pipe chambers so every pipe is sitting on top of the box that's pressurised by those blowers or fans and there's a valve underneath each pipe which is controlled by the console which is the third component of the organ and the way that this organ works is that basically when you play a key here it sends an electrical impulse through a wire to the valve underneath the pipe and that opens up and lets the air go into the pipe well you don't want to have all those pipes playing at once so we have what are called stops here and they're called stops because they stop the wind from going into into one particular set of pipes right now they're all pushed in but if I'll pull one of these out for instance this is the one the lowest or largest pipes on the organ this is the 32 foot BOM bar that's played by the pedal pedal board if I pull that out then you'll only hear that set of pipes playing so that pipe is actually about 32 feet long that's the next one in that set so right now that's the only set of pipes that's turned on for the pedals if I pull all of these out like this you'll hear the sound of of the full pedal division which sounds like this but you also have others that are trumpets for instance or flutes or French horn and all different kinds of variations in between these white buttons underneath the keyboards let us change the sounds on the fly so that when you're playing a piece if you want to make a quick change between that trumpet and that flute instead of having to reach over and pull those on manually you can just push one of these buttons here underneath the keyboards and you can see how the stops go in and out to make a quick change there and these white buttons are duplicated by the black toe studs we call them just above the pedal keyboard and those are handy because a lot of the time both hands are busy but only one foot is busy most of the time so you can reach over and press one of those with the foot that's free the pedals down here that look like gas pedals are called swell pedals and they control the volume of each keyboard if you think about it each keyboard here is like an individual organ by itself all the pipes connected to this bottom keyboard are in one location these are in a different location the pipes for the third manual or are up above in the center section this is the solo keyboard those are over there on the far north side and then the the pipes connected to the top keyboard are called the antiphonal division and those are all the way in the back of the tabernacle and if you notice those got soft at the end that's because I push down this pedal the swell pedal to close the shutters on those pipes pipe organs have have kept pace with technology not so much in the sound generation - all these sounds that you're hearing now are produced but just by pipes by air blowing through pipes so where where technology has helped us out is in having many different presets here in the old days every time you went to play a new broadcast or a new recital you had to reset these manually by hand because there was only enough memory for one organ recital or one broadcast but now we have 256 memory levels in the organ and then we can save limitless numbers of these on a USB flash drive using this little port right up here and that also enables us to backup what's in the in the resident memory of the organ so that's one area where technology really is has helped us a lot

Channel: The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square

Views: 228,559

Keywords: Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Mormon Tab Choir, Mormon, LDS, motab, mo-tab, Orchestra at Temple Square, Music and the Spoken Word, Richard Elliott, Richard Elliot (Musical Artist), Pipe Organ (Musical Instrument), Salt Lake Tabernacle Organ (Musical Artist), Salt Lake Tabernacle (Location)

Id: NN0gfBjZWOc

Length: 5min 47sec (347 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 21 2014