Yamaha ES8

I've been asked to play the organ at our new church. But it's a difficult instrument mainly because the church ran out of money and were not able to build a swell box around the pipes (that's the thing that regulates volume). So there's no soft setting on the organ. The church has a lot of stone and that makes the room acoustically very "live." The organ has two volumes; fairly loud and make-your- head-buzz loud. Since there's no volume pedal, you can only control the volume by the selection of stops selected.

So I decided I would purchase a good keyboard synthesizer to hook up to my computer so that there could actually be some variety of music. I found this Yamaha ES8 on eBay. It has like a 1,000 or more different sounds programmed into it, including some great pipe organs from around the world. It has the capability of "sampling," which means I can record a sound, copy it into the keyboard, and it will create a voice that will be pitched to every key on the keyboard. So, I could sample the church organ, put it into the Yamaha, and with a good amplifier and speaker I don't think you could tell that it wasn't the real organ.


By programming some of the music on my computer I don't have to work as hard. Right now I'm scheduled to play on December 7, Decembeer 14, and Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. But there's about a 200 page manual I have to go thru just to figure out all this instrument can do. So I'll be busy, but it will be a lot of fun.