3 ms·

What's the thing that breaks the most in organs?

• solresol 3y ago
  When the musician presses a key on the console, there are three possible technologies for turning that key press into air going into the pipe. 1. It could be an electric signal, in which case the most common thing to fail in the organ is the relay that opens and closes the valve. 2. It could be a pneumatic signal: the keypress opens a valve to let air through to a tiny tube which opens the valve on the music pipe. This was surprisingly reliable, but I'm slightly biased because a few decades before my apprenticeship, a slightly idiosyncratic pipe organ builder had been operating in the area, and he was a passionate believer in the goodness of pneumatics over all other technologies, so over his career he got very, very good at making reliable pneumatics. On those organs, it tended to be the tubing that would split. 3. Fully mechanical: you press the key to open the valve to let air into the pipe. The most stops you have open, the harder you have to press the keys. These tended to be much older instruments, so I saw a lot of holes in the bellows material. --- Other surprisingly common failure: birds and mice falling into the big pipes. Then they can't get out, and die in there. It gave a strange muted sound to that one note.