The Angelus Organ: april 2016

4/18/2016

Pulling reeds

First of all you need a tool to easily extract the reeds. Every reed has a notch. This makes it possible to pull them out

With a simple bicycle spoke, you can make a reed puller.

With a file, you can shape the head so that it perfectly fits in the notch of the reed.

Soldering extra material

Slide the postcard under the reed tongue

With the soldering iron add some solder at the tip of the tongue. Assure that no material cross the edges of the tongue.
mark the reed at the front with an alcohol marker, so that it's easy to find it back when it's back in its position
Slide the reed back into its position
Open the harmonicity Tuner app on your smartphone
Play the note
Read the note detected by the app
When the note is too low, remove the reed
With a small triangular file, remove some solder
Repeat the process until the note is correct
Remove the reed
With a file, clean up the front so it blinks. This is a good way to see which reeds are already tuned
Choose to tune the notes that are part of chords.
Choose lower octave notes, since the bass coupler also plays them.
Check if chords and octaves sound in harmony with pleasant beats

The Keyboard layout

This organ has a keyboard with 61 keys starting with an F

This is as follows

This seems to be common for pump reed organs. I have no idea why this is.

Registers

Bass Coupler
Diapason (rear row of reeds)
Principal (front row of reeds)
A vibrato knop which is broken off
Dulcet (front row of reeds)
Vox Celeste (front and rear rows of reeds)
Melodia (rear row of reeds)
Treble Coupler

Keyboard lay-out

The organ has a 61 keys F keyboard.

Current tuning

After going through all notes I realized that the organ is tuned with a 455 Hz reference instead of 440Hz. This is almost exactly a quarter of a note higher.

When googling "tuning with A4 = 455 Hz", it seems that is has been the standard tuning pitch in England until in 1953 a worldwide standard was defined at A4 = 440 Hz.

Since my organ originates from England, this explains its tuning reference at 455 Hz.

Here a sample from the book "Physics and music"

For several hundred years, the pitch of (the notes of the musical scales has been determined by specifying A4 as the standard of pitch. The frequency of this standard note has varied widely and changed so frequently that no set value could really be called standard.

In Handel's time (1685-1759), A4 was determined by his personal tuning fork, which had a frequency 422.5 Hz. Since the brilliance of string instruments, like the violin family, appears to increase with higher frequencies, the standard A4 gradually went up in value until ar the end of the nineteenth century it had reached 461 Hz in the United States and 455 Hz in England. Since a change in standard pitch imposes major problems on musicians and

instrument manufacturers, a ﬁxed value became more and more essential. Finally in 1953, the International Standards Organization recommended that A4 = 440 Hz be adopted as the standard frequency for music throughout the

world. Unfortunately, not all musicians followed the recommendation, and (here still exist some orchestral groups that tune their instruments to A4 = 442 Hz or A4 = 444 Hz.

Opera singers today are singing Beethoven and Mozart arias about a semitone higher than the pitch for which they were written.’ This necessitates tuning the accompanying string instruments by increasing their string tensions by nearly 12 percent. To do this. some of the violins made by the old Italian masters have had to be strengthened, which means that their tone quality is not the same.

Some years ago a scientiﬁc scale was developed that was based upon C being given by integral powers of the number 2, On this scale, middle c has a frequency of 256 Hz. There are many of such tuning forks still around and

commercially available, and many high school and college science teachers still like middle C at 256 Hz

The standard of pitch for most symphony orchestras today is taken to be A4 = 440 Hz. The oboist usually carries a tuning fork or pitch pipe to sound the correct pitch. The other musicians then tune to the oboe.

4/16/2016

Tuning organ to 440Hz : The Plan

Introduction

A couple of years ago I bought an old reed organ which was still in pretty good state for its age. The organ is manufactured in the United Kingdom at the end of the 19th century.
The reason I bought it was to use it in our Neil Young Tribute band.
After a mechanical restoration, I introduced it to the band.

There was one problem. It was not tuned with 440Hz as reference. At the end of the 19th century there was no standard for tuning instruments.
As a result it could not be used with other instruments. Guitars can be tuned differently. So that could have been a workaround.
But Neil Young uses his organ together with his harmonicas. And harmonicas cannot be tuned.

So the organ ended up in a corner collecting dust.

The plan is to tune it to 440 Hz reference tuning, so it can be used together with other instruments.