The entire organ is in a swell box and there are no display pipes.
The case front is formed by three fretted panels, now backed with
red material.
The organ has never seen a tuning slide and
never completely reached Equal Temperament. By straightening the
pipes and carefully resetting the speech and regulation, I was able
to arrive at the original unequal temperament with D-flat and A-flat
instead of C-sharp and G-sharp. These notes could never have been
sharper nor the others flatter. As I found the same tuning
characteristics on each stop I am sure that the original tuning
system has been restored. All pipe work was straightened and placed
on speech without cutting the pipe tops. A semblance of unequal
temperament was to hand. Careful observations of this were made and
the same semblance of tuning was observed on each metal stop
separately. This was done at three stages; on the voicing machine,
when the organ was set up in the workshop and finally on site. It
was only when the organ was being finished on site that tuning cones
were used to tune the instrument.
The interesting and most
important characteristics found are those of C-sharp and G-sharp,
both of which notes are consistently much flatter than in equal
temperament and are therefore really D-flat and A-flat. This is
conclusive evidence because this was observed on virtually every
pipe and these pipes could never have been originally sharper
because they are too long. Of course they had been torn down and
smashed sharper by cones in subsequent tunings; it is to be observed
that even the Clarabella pipes have been cut on these notes.
The final temperament is certainly very close to the original used
as there is very little tolerance available once all aspects of
voicing regulation and pipe lengths have been considered. The pitch
of the organ is slightly flat to A=438, and the tuning is set as
follows:
C-G as
per equal temperament
G-D as
per equal temperament
D-A as
per equal temperament
A-E as
per equal temperament
E-B pure
B-F sharp pure
F sharp-D flat very
flat- 8 cycles per second (1ft pitch)
D flat-A flat pure
A flat-D sharp-
very sharp- 8 cycles per second (1ft pitch)
D sharp-A sharp-
pure
A sharp-F as
per equal temperament
F-C as
per equal temperament
Article taken from The Organbuilder, Volume 13
October 1995