The first thing that is noticeable for this English Romantic organ is the appearance: It has two fronts on both sides of the church (I can better say Cathedral).
The reverberation in such a cathedral is of course very long. The position of the microphones is very important:
Or on a great distance with a very long reverb that you don't hear the individual voices, or very close to the organ where the beautiful acoustics lost.
For this sample set is a good intermediate form chosen, I suspect that the samples are a mix of 'direct' sounds and 'indirect' sound.
The individual voices are clearly audible, even the soft strings.
It is planned that a sample set is made in three versions:
Wet Edition
Surround Edition
Dry Edition
At first comes the Wet Edition.
This version comes out in three consecutive 'Volumes', now I write, only Volume 1 is available.
The splitting of a large organ in different parts was probably inspired by commercial motives.
As a user I also enjoy, it is very good to learn the organ in parts.
28 stops are much easier to overlook than 65.
The 28 stops (distributed over three keyboards) provide sufficient opportunities for many types of music to play:
Beautiful strings on the Swell.
Powerful principals (and mixture) at both Great and Swell.
Beautiful flutes on all three keyboards, a pity that Volume 1 contains only one Fluit4.
Very nice reeds. The strong and detailed Trompet8 (with beautiful reverb) on the Great, I think is the best Trumpet8 of all sample sets that I currently have.
A major strength of this sample set is that part of the stops (the three stops on Solo, all reeds and the VoxAngelica8 of Swell) are recorded also with Tremulant.
Technically, it seems quite tricky: for all stops the 'wave' must be in the same place, otherwise you get a strange effect when you combine multiple stops (with tremulant).
The tremulant samples are technically 'at the location' of the 'multiple attack samples', so be sure that you load (the first time) also all 'attack samples'.
Adjust the volume after installation (Menu Organ Settings / General Options / Master level adjust dB) to 10 dB, because it is standard at -10 dB, it is far too low.
The low 'standard volume' is, according to the producer, the result of 'an optimization for 16 bit samples'.
In our church I sometimes get accused of being too much like baroque and contemporary music play.
However, it should because our (1 keyboard) organ is not suitable for romantic music.
But with this sample set it is, in my opinion, a great pleasure to play 'tear-jerkers' with both Tremulants active.
After the download (handy, that this is possible!) was finished I could hardly stop playing.
But I had to stop because I had to go to the birthday of my grandmother of 92 years (a blessing).
What a 'cathedral' suggests: There is a great reverberation present in this church.
This is also nicely captured in this sample set.
Nice to hear the difference by keyboard: The Solo manual has the longest reverberation, then the Great, and finally the Swell.
As with the other sample sets of Milan, also the reverb of this sample set is not entirely 'noise free', that is not bad if you turned 'the wind engine / background sound' on.
But one weakness of this sample set is, in my opinion, the sound of the 'the wind engine / background sound', it looks more 'noise' than 'church background sound'.
I also think the OpenBass16, OpenDiapason16 and Octava8 of the Pedal are very heavy and very dominant.
With Hauptwerk Advanced it is fortunately possible to lower the volume.
At the Swell are very nice (soft) 'solo' voices (e.g. Trompette8, Hautboy8, ContraFagotto8), however, they must be accompanied by a soft stop.
This is in Volume1 (limited) possible with the FluteHarmonique8 (Solo), StoppedDiapason8 (Gr) or ClaribelFlute8 (Gr).
The registration console is a good combination of beautiful, realistic and practical.
As in the original organ, there are 8 general 'combination pistons', and further 8 separately for each keyboard.
I use the latter never.
On this sample set are many couplers, so it is no problem if you have two keyboards, you can 'couple' almost each keyboard to each other.
For Volume 1 is a computer with 4 GB RAM enough (see requirements).
It is worth to download the free trial version from Instrument Downloads.
