About

Music

I was born in the USA and have always loved music: classical, modern and theatre. When I was 13 I started to learn music by playing the trombone. I was terrible at it as I didn’t have enough lung capacity and ended up huffing and puffing my way through every piece.

About this time, my mother decided she wanted an organ and, since I liked classical music, I wanted an organ I could play classical music on. This was the ‘fun’ 60’s, and organs were everywhere: Hammond, Conn, Lowrey, Allen and, of course, the do-it-yourself Schober. While I wanted a lovely, classical one (lovely being relative), my mother wanted an organ with a rhythm kit built in and big Leslie speakers. She picked a Lowrey Theatre organ: Two manual, 61 keys and 27 foot pedals (or was it 25?). It worked and, as long as I didn’t turn on some of the ‘fun’ features, I could practice on it. (Bach with a bossa-nova beat and Leslie speakers is rather horrible.)

I pushed into classical pretty quickly and loved playing. I would go down to my church and practice on their small pipe organ and enjoy the sound of real pipes. (Oh - and don’t forget the bassoon! ¹) I might not have been a good organist, but I really enjoyed playing. I even had an organ instructor² helping me. For some weird reason, I’ve never liked playing the piano. Don’t know why, but I’ve never understood why people think you should play piano first then organ.

I continued to play the organ until I went to university. My parents gave me a choice: learn a real skill or pay for university myself. I didn’t have the funds, so I went into computers. The University didn’t let you play instruments unless you were studying it, and churches in Detroit weren’t exactly welcoming when it came to letting you play with their organs.

Over the years I have wanted an organ in my home but never had the space. Organ consoles tend to take up quite a large amount of floorspace; living in San Francisco, and later London, meant floorspace was at a premium.

After decades, I finally have a small space I can dedicate to having an organ. Nothing too grand, but with keyboards getting cheaper, cheap computers for MIDI-fying old pedalboards, and virtual pipe organ software being free, the time seemed right.

This blog is all about the journey from fantasy to reality, all over about 8 months. It will cover as much information about my decisions but also give you some information I found along the way. I hope it will make other people think about playing the organ. Once popular it seems to have declined sharply over the years.

For anyone that has children, don’t do as my parents did. Giving up the organ was a stupid decision and I should have been encouraged to do science and music. Music, and art, are wonderful things for a person to study, and enjoy.

Computers

I had started university with the idea of going into chemistry. I switched to computers when I found out how much more fun they could be. Except for my Cobol class. Learning Cobol was the most tedious, boring thing I did. I never used it and it made me loath overly verbose computer languages. I did really well in low-level programming and seemed to have a knack for software. Off I went into a life-long software career that did allow me a lot of work flexibility and mobility. It was through computers that I was able to move to the England.

As for computer languages, I’ve professionally used: assembler (different computers), Fortran, C, C++, C#, PHP, Go, and a few others. I really, really don’t like Cobol.

Travel

I love to travel: new landscapes, buildings, culture and food. I spent a lot of time in the 90’s going to Europe and Australia. People say ‘travel broadens the mind’, I say travel makes life more exciting. I spent 5 weeks in Australia, traveling and meeting new people. It is horribly expensive and was a wonderful trip. Spending time in Europe, traveling on train, going around the UK were all experiences I’d never want to give up.

The worst part is Americans get so little time for holidays. They use them to do work around the house or visit relatives, both of which are good things, but 2 weeks holiday a year is a scandal. Worse, Americans tend to work long hours during the week and don’t take time to enjoy life.