Organ Grand Staff (with Pedals)

[BCMayes]

Greetings

Does anyone here write for organ with Notion? I mean the classic "Church" organ with two manual staves and one pedal staff. How did you affect necessary the three staves for one instrument?

I can make a piano grand staff and then put another staff underneath, but Notion considers those to be two separate instruments. That's not very useful when dealing with, well, anything having to do with a single instrument.

I'm unable to find anything in the user guide, but it's possible I missed something. I know there are no organ samples (not even as an add-on), but lots of amateurs and professionals play the organ (in church, concert hall, schools, theaters, department stores). I can't imagine that the instrument is completely forgotten now that the software is up to version 4, and my search of the guide wasn't necessarily the cleanest search.

Thanks for any help.

Byron

[wcreed51]

You can assign any number of staffs to one instrument. Select the staff of the instrument you want to assign; press Shift-I; click on the staff you want to include.

But I'm not sure how useful that is without an organ library. I know there are several on the market, but have no experience, so can't comment.

[pcartwright]

I'm not too familiar with organ notation myself, but I think you are on point with creating the grand staff and a separate staff for the pedal notation.

Using Bill's Shift+I technique will allow you to route the pedal clef to the grandstaff so that you only need to load one instrument (which will save time, RAM, processing, etc).

There are quite a few organ VSTis on the market. Garritan released one recently which seems to have a nice variety of sounds, but that's another topic altogether. It should be pretty easy to set up a grand staff and pedal staff with one instrument once you get an organ library that you like.

[BCMayes]

You can assign any number of staffs to one instrument. Select the staff of the instrument you want to assign; press Shift-I; click on the staff you want to include.

But I'm not sure how useful that is without an organ library. I know there are several on the market, but have no experience, so can't comment.

Thanks. I'm not sure this is what I want to do. In Edit mode (that's where I should be correct? Not in Score Setup mode?) I select the grand staff that I have set up for the organ manuals and type shift-i.

A "Change Instrument" box comes up showing the instrument I selected. I can change it to another preset instrument (of which organ is not one), but there's nothing to indicate that I can now change the two staves to three. Perhaps you can share a bit more detail as to what I'm supposed to be looking for. What do you mean by "click on the staff you want to include"?

I won't be needing an organ library as an actual organist is going to perform the final printed music. On that end, the kludge work-around of adding a new instrument for the pedals below the grand staff is functional. However, when it comes to the intricacies of producing the score with Notion, the three staves should really function as one instrument. That means working with just one set of dynamics, tempo markings, measure numbers/rehearsal letters, spacing, etc. as well as the speed and processing benefits pcartwright mentions.

Thanks!
Byron

[BCMayes]

I'm not too familiar with organ notation myself, but I think you are on point with creating the grand staff and a separate staff for the pedal notation.

Using Bill's Shift+I technique will allow you to route the pedal clef to the grandstaff so that you only need to load one instrument (which will save time, RAM, processing, etc).

There are quite a few organ VSTis on the market. Garritan released one recently which seems to have a nice variety of sounds, but that's another topic altogether. It should be pretty easy to set up a grand staff and pedal staff with one instrument once you get an organ library that you like.

Thanks. The grand+1 kludge will work for the final printed music (though I have to figure out how to get Notion to produce one part from two instruments ), but it's really a bit burdensome when it comes to producing the score. It's twice as much work when it comes to things like dynamics and tempo markings.

It looks like this technique is more about digital playback than scoring, though I could be missing something. Ultimately this may just be something Notion has to fix. I can still produce organ scores in Sibelius in the meantime.

Thanks!
Byron

[pcartwright]

Can you provide an example of an organ piece with dynamics, etc that you want to produce in Notion (or something similar)? I'm sure you can manage an organ part in Notion; I'm just not familiar enough with organ notation (specifically pedal notation) to assist without a reference.

[Zblogny]

But I'm not sure how useful that is without an organ library. I know there are several on the market, but have no experience, so can't comment.

There is a very good Soundfont Organ library : Jeux14.sf2 by John McCoy :

http://www.hammersound.com/cgi-bin/soun ... jeux14.rar

You just need a good VSTi Soundfont player.
Jeskola is IMHO the best for this purpose: it embeds a good reverb (essential for these dry sounds), and a "Vel to Vol" setting: when set to zero it neutralizes the velocity changes coming from the keyboard, making the playing more plausible.
http://www.jeskola.net/xs1/