I have taken the marvelous "essentially free" Pitea School of Music organ samples, created by Lars Palo and extended by Al Morse, and further extended it to create new larger organ I call simply "Les' Pitea." Al made his CODM file available for his extension and I used this as a starting point. I have enlarged this to have almost the same specification as my old "Model 945" organ so I can could it as practice instrument in my home.

I really like these samples because they have a short reverberation time and a nice variety of sounds. After seeing the great job Al did in extending the set, I took it as a challenge to go further.

This organ is "free" in that you can download the samples from Al's web site and use them as long as you adhere to the terms he and Lars have put forth.

The specification of my Pitea Organ is as follows.

Notice that I have added a "Chimes" stop. I am using the same sample I installed on my Model 945 organ.

In keeping with my philosophy to keep things inexpensive and accessible, the Pitea Organ displays are sized for 1024x768 screens. I have created a new smaller keyboard graphics set as well as small drawknobs and couplers especially for this organ. They are all made available for free.

Here are the console and stop views:

If you want to try this organ, be sure you have Hauptwerk v4 or higher (this organ will work with the Free Edition of HW v4 and does not require a special dongle file) and have already installed the Pitea organ from Al Morse's web site.

Then download the following:

Hauptwerk Installation rar

This is a Hauptwerk standard installation package in rar format. Save it to your disk, start Hauptwerk, and then use its install feature to read the rar file as per the manual.

I have heard from some users (outside the USA) that you might need to disable the "wind model" for the organ to play properly. Since I am in the USA I was not abe to test this at the time - but it sounds reasonable.

CODM Source File

This one is optional. I provide the source code for the Hauptwerk editor so you can see how I did all this and get ideas for your own projects. You will have to rename this file after downloading to "Les-945-v2_0.CustomOrgan_Hauptwerk_xml." I could not get the download function to work properly with the new extra-long file extension required by Hauptwerk 4!

This organ is a great value. You get ~80 ranks for free (I get nothing - but I have great a day job). Since the samples are 16-bit, the instrument fits into RAM on all but the very smallest computers. The reverb on the samples is more than adequate for practicing. I add additional convolutional reverb on my recordings.

Here is a demo recording I made of this instrument. There is only one - but it is long and complex!