I have heard very good things about Hauptwerk, are there any others that are as good or better in your experience? Looking for an AU plugin or even a standalone if its exceptional. I'm not keen on subscriptions, but what are the opinions on Hauptwerk?

Hauptwerk is excellent, but pricey. IMO, it is better to have Hauptwerk in a small church rather than a minimal pipe organ. You need to purchase the main VST. Basic is $250.00 Advanced $600.00. Then you need to buy the sample sets. Many are sampled from the worlds most famous organs. You need to have a midi controller, or two, or three manuals, and pedals. It is amazing though.

Your question was: "Are there any better"? Not that I am aware of.

https://www.mixtuur.com/en/hauptwerk...ptwerk-organs/

Grand Orgue is fun and you can get pretty far for free, but it isn't a plugin, and probably isn't better than Hauptwerk. https://sourceforge.net/p/ourorgan/wiki/Home/

I love this IOS app: Victorian Chapel Organ.

GrandOrgue is free and opensource. Though I dont get the latency there with asio drivers as short I'd like, but playable anyway and recommended to tryout.

https://sourceforge.net/p/ourorgan/wiki/Home/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ourorgan/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandOrgue

Never

Modartt Organteq

Hi,

for years I have been playing pipe organ as a simulation (with an organ pedal and 3 keyboards).

I started with Hauptwerk many years ago when it was free.
But the author has decided to "unfree" it. I was very unhappy with his decision.

I cannot recommend Hauptwerk because for what it is, it is way too expensive, so I use some free solutions, mainly GrandOrgue.
In Hauptwerk you need much, much RAM (>8GB) because it has no disc streaming (this is ridiculous for this price).

You can get lots of free, very well-made pipe organs for GrandOrgue or Hauptwerk.
Especially from this side:
https://piotrgrabowski.pl/instruments/

Of course, there are also some professional pipe organs in Kontakt format.
The problem with this format is you cannot really independently pull out the stops.

Old, but not too bad either, there are some free pipe organs in soundfont format:

https://www.realmac.info/jeux1.htm

https://www.hedsound.com/2019/10/hed...soundfont.html

To use a soundfont, you also need a soundfont player, standalone or as a VST.
Soundfont is very, very resource-friendly.

I use mainly virtualMIDISynth which is also a good MIDI GM player:
https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth

best regards

PS: For me the future is/will be Modartt Organteq
https://www.modartt.com/organteq

You're probably right in a lot of cases.

My comment about a minimal pipe organ refers to organs with fewer stops, pipes and quality of materials. A comparison in sound would be to a sample set that comes with the basic version of Hauptwerk, "St. Anne’s Moseley" (30 Stops), which is not very rich sounding organ IMO. Compared to, say, the "Rotterdam - Laurenskerk " (88 Stops) which is very full and rich sounding.

Once I was playing in small chapel which had 4 stop organ from late 19th century (1M+P, 3 stops for manual - Principal 8', Portunal 8' and Oktave 4' and one 16' stopped Subbass for pedal). And, for that chapel, I'd still take this acoustic instrument over any digital. Modern digital instruments (or HW/GO samplesets) sound very good, but they still sound like a recording - the feeling is vastly different. Perhaps they would sound and feel more natural with separate outputs and speakers set for each stop, but then they wouldn't be cost effective anymore :P

BTW, as for electronic church organs - this analog Allen sounds absolutely amazing :O


But it looks like it wasn't built to be cheaper alternative to pipes - lots of output channels, and the racks with oscillators, filters and amplifiers took the whole room.

Thanks for the info. Will try some of these.

Have been using the Cathedral Organ that comes with Komplete and uses Kontakt Player. Sounds rich and full but gets real muddy when playing fast passages.

Thanks for all the info. I should specify, I'm not looking to create a simulated organ setup w/ multiple desks or pedals (at this point), but rather want to experiment w/ textures in a compositional context; experiment w/ the stops etc. Perhaps that might change the suggestions. Do any of the virtual instruments allow for the stops to be pulled out half way (or are they just on/off switches)?

Since pulling out stops half-way would make little sense on physical instruments, in all virtual ones they are just switches. Physically, it would only make any difference on fully mechanical action instruments, but it wouldn't be useful - when you don't provide enough air for the pipes, most of the time they just won't sound at all, or give you some weak whining On pneumatical or electrical action instruments they're just switches already

As for your main question - for having fun with recording, you should be good to go with GrandOrgue and freeware sample sets available for it.

Even though it's not a plug-in, you can use some virtual MIDI patching software + virtual MIDI ports, and just send MIDI from your DAW to it.

It actually makes sense but I'm coming at the instrument with a non-traditional approach. I figured as much that they'd just be switches for practicality reasons.

Hi,
then I clearly don't recommend GrandOrgue or Hauptwerk. They are for players and they don't integrate well into a DAW.
Hauptwerk only creates an audio link via VST into the DAW/VST host.

You should go for Modartt OrganTeq or a Kontakt sampling library.

Organteq is also very good for players and it integrates very well into a DAW/VST host. For instance you can instantiate it multiple times (not possible with Hauptwerk).

I actually used the Black Friday offer to get OrganTeq.

best regards

Has anyone tried this Kontakt Organ library out?

http://www.soniccouture.com/en/produ...-saints-organ/