Software

What did I choose? Well, other pages have pretty much said what I decided, but here is one page

VPO (Virtual Pipe Organ)

I chose GrandOrgue (G.O.) to start with rather than Hauptwerk or jOrgan. The choice was simple: something free that would let me get started but still have “real” (well, realish) organ sounds or pay a fairly large amount of money for software that I wouldn’t really take full advantage of as I’m not a good organist by far. Hence the Organ Monkey name. In the future I may move over to Hauptwerk but at the moment I think GrandOrgue will do fine.

The Cantorum Duo (C.D.) does not send thumb-piston notifications. When you store a stop combination to a thumb-piston, it will transmit all of the MIDI codes for each stop. That makes it a bit difficult to tie a combination to a thumb piston. So, you can have a several choices:

1. Map the C.D. stops to stops on an organ (e.g. Octave 4' to a 4' stop in GrandOrgue). Then, map other buttons (e.g. Baroque or Symphonic) to combination pistons. A bit clumsy but it works.
2. Tie a stop to a piston and use the G.O. control panel for individual stops. This lets you use the thumb pistons to select combinations on the G.O.
3. Buy bluetooth buttons map to combination pistons. I currently don’t have any buttons available so this isn’t yet an option. The other two options have compromises that I’m learning to live with until I can find another option.

Sheet Music Software

Since I’m using Windows for the GrandOrgue, I found a simple program that imports PDFs and allows you to annotate them. Page turns are through page-up and page-down, or touch. I don’t have a touch screen so I use a macro program to control it through a number pad.

The software I bought was PowerMusic Professional, which had an offer at £10. I thought at this price it was cheap enough to give a go. It works pretty well, though I do think the interface is a bit dated in feel. For the price, it was well worth it.

Other software in use

Adobe Scan for iOS

To get my music into the system, I use Adobe Scan on my mobile phone to scan the pages. (Adobe Scan is free to download.) I keep the PDFs and the originals for backup purposes. ¹

This has a 25 page limit for character recognition (which doesn’t matter much to me). You do need to be careful not to get loads of shadows on the pages as you snap, and you will probably have to do some page cleanup after you scan. It takes a bit of time, but you only need to do it once. My method is:

1. light the pages evenly from the sides
2. When scanning, move the phone so it doesn’t get more than one page (left or right)
3. Scan the whole book then sit down and fix the pages. Don’t do it while scanning or it seems to take forever.

• Advantage: Free, character recognition, can cleanup after scanning
• Disadvantage: shadows on pages if not careful, can be slow to scan a large book, need care to get pages scanned cleanly.