St. George's Casavant Sample Set
for Hauptwerk™ Version 2 and 3

This sample set was created using microphones positioned close to the pipes. In addition the decay portions of the samples in this set have been specially shaped and trimmed so that
(a) they will not conflict with the natural acoustic of the space wherein playback will occur, and
(b) when played back in a dry listening environment, external reverberation can be added separately through software, or through an external reverb processing unit. Users can then select the reverberation type and levels to their liking. Unlike wet sample sets, there is not a limitation to a set number of releases. This means that the release more properly reflects the note's characteristics (e.g. duration and dynamic frequency spectrum of the note) leading up to its release as is found in a natural acoustic. Also, when compared to wet sample sets, a dry set can provide more realistic tremulant modeling when played back with external reverberation added.

All pipe recordings (individual wav files) were recorded at 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, stereo. For this Hauptwerk v2/v3 version, the nine stops of the Great Division have been re-recorded and new samples prepared. In addition, a new stop, the Trompette Heroique 8', has been created and placed in the Choir Division (to replace the previously borrowed (GT) Trompette 8' stop). The Trompette Heroique 8' is LOUD and serves as a solo stop. By popular request, in April 2008 a new stop, the Contra Fagotto 32' has been added to the Pedal Division. Special thanks to Steve Mann for the the creation of this stop (based on an extended Fagotto 16' swell rank), the associated modifications to the ODF, and the modifications to the ODF to accomodate a new Crescendo integer step indicator which makes it easier to identify the current crescendo stage when setting the crescendo switches, and also during performance.

The set requires about 2 GB of hard disk space. The RAM (physical) memory required to load all samples (16-bit, stereo, compressed, including the memory Hauptwerk needs when running) is between 1.7 and 1.8 GB (and slightly higher with Windows 64-bit OS). The sample set has been optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768.

This sample set has not been encoded (no special dongle registrations required) and users are free to use the stops in combination with stops from other organs (if allowed by the licenses of the other organ sample set producers). More importantly, the organ definition file (ODF) and the individual pipe wav files are not encoded and users are free to edit them.