Oh the joy! It works!

After weeks of searching, planning, worrying, and finally troubleshooting, my ADC-4900 Allen organ is now safely installed. Still stuff to fix, but it is now playing as well or better than it did in its prior home.

Like so many major changes in life, the significance of having my own personal, in home, practice organ is just beginning to sink in. None of those frigid early morning practice sessions I had in junior high, nor those stuffy, musty smelling practice rooms from high school. Maybe it's just furniture polish, but I even like the way this organ smells! I've already put in two practice sessions this weekend. The first in many years. This pleasurable luxury of a home organ is just one reality that has changed.

The other changed reality is what happens when you haven't played the organ for decades. Will my feet remember their intervals? Can my fingers remember how to substitute for each other or constantly get tangled? How rusty can one get and still recover, at least to where one left off?

Meanwhile, I have also explored the organ's features more deeply. I've noticed that the swell pedal actually changes the stop tone! Wow! This is a far cry from those old practice organs. I'd never confuse this organ with a pipe organ, but the expression pedal does make the organ sound a lot more like pipes in a real swell box than the old Baldwin practice organ or church Hammond organ where the expression pedals merely modulated the volume.

And MIDI works! True, it appears to be only Note-On, Note-Off (at least when plugged into my little Casio keyboard Midi-In port) but the organ does have some boxes labeled "Midi-Expression" hidden in the console innards, so maybe there still is some hope for Midi Expression. Time will tell.