The 2 Manual Ringway 1000E organ with a 2 octave spinnet pedalboard and two 5 octave keyboards
Other Organs
Eminent Alpha 32 church organ
Yamaha HS8
The Ringway 1000E replaces the aging Yamaha HS8 and is in Artic White rather than the black of the Yamaha, which brightens the corner. The organ has a new light stand as well to illuminate the music and I have put in a desk lamp on the floor to better illuminate the pedals. I have wanted to get to at least 5 octaves on both manuals and although I would like a full radiating pedal board, at least the Ringway has two octaves and some 400 sounds most of which are very realistic. I found out that by default the polyphony on the pedals was turned off and being able to turn this on, gives more playing opportunities.
So for me this is quite an upgrade. I now have two organs that are quite capable, the Eminent which is truely great as a church organ and the Ringway for playing more theatre and orchestral sounds. The Ringway has an extensive sound library of some 422 difficerent sounds. I certainly have not tried them all out yet and in multiple combinations but those that I have played with sound very realistic. The Traditional clarinet really does sound good. Each manual can have two different polyphonic banks plus one or two lead voices which are monophonic. These can also be split on the keyboard giving four different sounds, if both keyboards are split. The split point can be changed. By default the split point is at A3.
I have three different set of registrations provided on a USB, which can be loaded into the memory. There are 4 different banks each with 16 sounds assigned to them and with the three sets of registations this gives 3 x 64 set of pre made tones. Of course you can make your own up to suit and this is what I prefer to do as the prebuilt ones don't do what I want. In time I will build a compete set of registrations for all the songs and tunes I play. As for the rythmn section I haven't quite got to grips with this yet There are plenty to choose from but they sound too quiet to me.
All the notes are set up as touch sensitive. This isn't natural to me as I have only played an organ, so I have set up my own registration with this feature turned off. The setup is saved to USB. Each time the organ boots it goes back to a set of default registrations, so I have to load these in each time I wish to play the organ.
Ringway 1000E and Hauptwerk
Setting this up caused us more grief than it should have because of the lack of information, but once we worked out that each manual, upper lower and the pedals were coded as two because of the split points, it was possible. The Upper keyboard was channel 1 and 2 and the lower 3 and 4 and the pedal 5 and 6, and we then disabled the odd numbers then we managed to get Hauptwerk working with the organ. I needed to turn off the split points and enable all the midi on the Ringway. The computer can connected via USB or Midi. After much experimentation we found that the USB seemed better.
Two expression pedals and two octaves of pedals and foot stitches on the expression pedals.
