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Swellboxes and crescendo pedal
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 Melbourne Town Hall Organ’s swellbox characteristics are brought to life through modeling.
The Melbourne Town Hall pipe organ contains 4 MIDI assignable swellbox pedals and all divisions are virtually enclosed. This means that once you assign a swellbox pedal to an enclosed division you can control its state instantly.
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 assign the four swell pedals to various enclosures, you can use the assignment buttons on the Keyboard Page.
Labeled with Sw1, Sw2, Sw3 and Sw4 each swell pedal can be assigned to control one or more divisions. For example, if you would like to control the Swell and the Choir together with a single pedal, just assign both of them to Sw1. The state of the swell pedals is set to default once you assign them to an other division.
The crescendo pedal is positioned to the right of the foot-operated swellbox pedals. After enabling the funtion by pressing the “Cresc” button, sliding 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, labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, each pre-loaded in the instrument, but you can freely modify them.
Note: If you enable the crescendo funtion on a non-zero position of the crescendo pedal, the corresponding combination will load.
In the original pipe organ, the crescendo function is ‘blind’, which means that the activated stops are not seen by the organist and remain unaffected by stop selection/deselection.
he figure below shows the Console Page, highlighting the crescendo pedal (rightmost pedal), four swell pedals (to the left of crescendo pedal), the displays showing the state of the crescendo pedal and the crescendo funtion enabler LED button. You can find the enabler button on all Pages.
Information
Last updated: 18 April 2019
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