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Swellboxes and crescendo wheel

Swellboxes are enclosures with vertical venetian blind-type shutters controlled by the swell pedals (or ‘swell shoes’). As a given shutter closes, the pipes contained in that swellbox will sound quieter and darker (with lesser amounts of high overtones). The Esztergom Organ’s swellbox characteristics are brought to life through modeling.

The Esztergom pipe organ Collector’s Edition contains 3 MIDI assignable swellbox pedals and all divisions - except for the pedalboard - are virtually enclosed. This means that once you assign a swellbox pedal to an enclosed division you can control its state instantly. By default, the following assignments are effective:

	Swell pedal 1 (Sw1)	Swell pedal 2 (Sw2)	Swell pedal 3 (Sw3)
Division	Positive (manual #3)	Oberwerk (manual #4)	Schellwerk (manual #5)

Each enclosed division has its own independent enclosure charasteristics. Once you change the swellbox pedal to division assignment, you can control the enclosures of different divisions one-by-one, but multiple assignments (one pedal controls more) are also available.

To set which enclosures the available three swell pedals control you can use the assignment buttons on the KeyboardMass page (see chapter 3.9). Labeled with Sw1, Sw2, Sw3 each swell pedal can be assigned to control one or more divisions. For example, if you would like to control the Positive and the Schellwerk together with a single pedal, just assign both of them to Sw1.

The crescendo wheel is an axially rotating drum operated by foot control, and is used in place of a conventional crescendo pedal. The wheel is positioned to the left of the foot-operated swellbox pedals. Sliding (rolling) it forward from position 0 to a higher position triggers stops in a preset user-defined manner, according to the sequence contained in the respective Crescendo Program. There are 4 independent crescendo programs available.

The above figure shows the Console page, highlighting the crescendo pedal (left pedal), two swell pedals (middle and right pedals), and the display showing the state of the crescendo and swell pedals.

User defined crescendo programs

In this instrument every division has its dedicated crescendo control page, named from “Cresc. 1” to “Cresc 6”. On each crescendo page there is a list of the stops and couplers in the division. Every stop and coupler on the list has its own horizontal line on the page, consisting of dots numbered from 00 to 60, referring to the possible positions of the crescendo wheel. There is and “on” and “off” state of each dot in each line, indicated by their color (white - off, blue - on), which can be changed by clicking them on the display. If one dot’s state is “on“, then that particular stop (or coupler) which the dot belongs to, will be turned on when the crescendo wheel is in the position indicated by the dot’s horizontal position. The EasyCrescendo programming feature makes definig crescendo programs quick and easy. When you click a dot, all the other dots in the same horizontal line from the selected position to the first position that has a different status than the selected one, will change their on/off state. This makes definig crescendo programs more convenient.

The following picture shows an example of a crescendo setting for the pedal board. In this setting, the crescendo wheel triggers more and more stops, while it is sliding forward from position 0 to higher positions.