Fracture Sounds recently released Blueprint: Church Organ, a free virtual instrument for Native Instruments’ free Kontakt Player.
Kontakt Player is available for macOS and Windows in VST3, AU, AAX, and standalone formats.
Fracture Sounds describes Church Organ as a grand pipe organ recorded in a roomy Georgian church.
The plugin features three mic positions and is designed to put out the full range of the organ’s sound, from soft and reedy tones to epic power.
Fracture Sounds created the library by recording the organ at St Paul’s Church in Huddersfield, England, and the release captures the distinctive reverb of the historic church.
Fracture Sounds created a 17-minute intro YouTube video for Church Organ, in which Marcus Warner explains the parameters and shows off a piece of music he wrote for the plugin.
If you prefer to skip straight to the audio demos, there are also three pieces of music showing off what Church Organ can do in a SoundCloud player embedded on the product page.
To my ears, it’s a virtual instrument with a simple concept and a great sound. There are no wacky features or anything; it’s just a faithful capture of a classic church organ sound.
I have to say the most distinctive part of the plugin is that big reverb sound, which is very evocative and adds some real majesty to the tone.
Church Organ is the 15th release in the free Blueprint virtual instrument series, and like the other releases, the interface is fairly minimalist.
The main panel features Swell, Colour, Stereo Width, and Reverb in single knob parameters, as well as four articulations (Mellow, Bright, Rich, Full).
The articulations utilize different combinations of organ stops at various intensities, and you can hear Warner run through them after 1:30 in the YouTube demo.
There are 41 stops on the physical instrument, but to keep things more user-friendly (and perhaps help reduce development time), the devs cut that down to just four articulation options in the virtual organ.
To the right of the main panel, you can adjust the levels of the three mic mix parameters (Close, Mid, Far), as well as mute or solo each of them. There’s also a Perspective slider that goes from Close to Far.
You can edit the Sample Start offset, Swell Intensity, and Release Volume on the Settings page.
It seems they’ve tried to just present the natural range of sounds that the organ can produce through leveraging different setups and mic arrangements, which works well for the release.
Accessing the freebie requires subscribing to the Fracture Sounds mailing list, and the download size is 2.5 GB.
Download: Blueprint: Church Organ (FREE – Kontakt 7 or higher required)
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