Today’s addition is the track with the working title Orgeldings (which needs to be changed, obviously).
I had been thinking for some time of doing something with a pipe organ. And pipe organ always hints at old Bach stuff – read counterpoint. So counterpoint it should be – but rather atonal counterpoint, with themes more into the Bartok Mikrokosmos realm.
The first step was finding a proper soft synth for that task: I’ve found that while most of those workstation-like synths and samplers (both soft and hard) deliever shitloads of tonewheel and other electr(on)ic organs, there’s not much in the pipe organ department. What’s more, if there’s anything, then it’s a sample of specifically one stop of an organ. I wanted something different.
The first attempt was Church Organ 2nd, a free VSTi plugin by C. Hackl. You basically get 5 oscillators per voice, plus ADSR and reverb. Apart from that, there’s exactly one organ-like sound. Still, using three instances (two manuals and a pedalboard) worked for the task, at least for composing and doing a first test drive.
The composition is built in three parts, each with about 20 seconds – and there’s three different themes, which throughout the three parts, are changed using the most basic counterpoint tools: diminuition, inversion and cancer. And yes, there’s an odd meter change in between, tempo changes, and a Hindemith-like chord opening and closing the track.