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THE ORGAN

HISTORY

This small but perfectly formed example of the work of Father Willis was built in 1888 for University College School in Hampstead, London and subsequently moved to the nearby Bickersteth Memorial Hall. It was discovered there in 1950 by John Ince, the then director of music at Ipswich School, and moved to Groton Parish church. The move was carried out by Henry Willis and Sons, Ltd who also renovated and modernised the instrument. Generous financial assistance was provided by friends of the church both here and in America.

Although it features a modest stop list, the organ is tonally very flexible. The church guide describes the organ as well suited to the church and goes on to say “... and possesses, in its Cornopean, a Willis ‘vintage’ reed of exceptional tonal quality”

HAUPTWERK V4 - V5+ VIRTUAL INSTRUMENT

The operation of this small virtual instrument is very straightforward.

All samples are presented at 44.1kHz, 16 bit with single loops. As well as individual samples for each pipe, the organ features blower, key action and stop action noise. This may be disabled by clicking on the blower on/off switch - note that switching off the blower won’t stop the pipes from sounding.

There are four pistons each to Great and Swell as well as divisional cancels, along with eight generals and a general cancel. These are all accessible via the Stops+Pistons screen as well as via MIDI (see screenshots below). Composition pedals for Great pistons 1 and 4 are also available on the Console screen.

This organ requires approximately 390 MB free memory to load uncompressed and 260 MB when each rank is loaded with lossless compression.

Direct download links for this sample set are as follows ...

Groton sample set for Hauptwerk v4 (legacy version - supports HW Free Edition)

Groton sample set for Hauptwerk-V+ (versions 5, 6, 7 and 8)

Click each thumbnail for full resolution screenshots