Nick's Homepage
Sunday 29th March 2009: It's been a while since the page has had any decent updates (as can be seen by the last update in 2007) so I thought I would make an update. Since 2007, recordings of another organ have been made at St. Augustine's Anglican church in Neutral Bay. The organ is a fine instrument built by Hill, Norman and Beard and is a wonderful example of an English organ that has survived with only very minor changes. I was hoping to have the instrument released by Feburary this year, but this has proven unachievable and now that I am back at university for the year, realistically there won't be any releases for at the very least 6 months, but I do hope to put some audio demos up soon as it is more-or-less playing in my development setup.
Over the last year, I have also been researching and developing my own algorithm for noise reduction (which can be found in the "software" section of the website). The project was commenced initially out of a desire to improve the quality of pipe speech transients in very noisy recordings, however the software has proven itself to be very powerful in general at: removing noise, preserving quality and achieving a somewhat-subjective "life" in samples. I have tested the software with samples from some other developers and have found it to work very well and I am now using it as the primary noise reduction for all of my sample sets. Soon I will put some audio comparisons up.
This new noise reduction software has also enabled me to re-visit the samples that I made of the 3-manual Hunter instrument that I sampled in 2007. It seems to be working very well on the pipework that I have trialed. This does not mean that the sampleset will be released as I am sure that not ALL of the instrument will be able to be saved - but some stops I may be able to release in separate packages.
My workload at university this semester is very large and I am finding very little time to work on these projects - but they will be completed at somestage... I just will not be able to do that much work until I have a break.
Saturday 15th September 2007: The recordings that were made of St. Andrew's, Summer Hill were found to be too difficult to process in order to complete the sample set to a high quality standard. The combined noise of the blower and the wind leakage in the organ was impossible to remove from the samples without damaging their quality significantly. I have decided that the organ is not worth re-sampling unless a restoration is performed at some stage in the future. The organ did have very nice sounding pipework, but it would simply be too difficult to sample in it's present state.
There is another organ planned to be sampled shortly with a similar specification, but I will not post more information on that organ until I've made the samples and am sure that the set can be completed.
Apologies to those who were anticipating this sample-set's release. I will be sure not to make a listing on this site in future without first making sure that the samples can be processed adequately.
Monday 30th April 2007: Hi! Thanks for taking a look at my organ website. It's had a bit of a makeover from the old layout (which I think has been necessary for a while).
This site contains compilations of my work relating to organs from console electronics to sample sets for software organ synthesis. Use the links on the left to look around the site.
|