THE CARL SCHÄFER ORGAN OF FRAUENKIRCHE NECKARSULM (D) - VERSION 2

Pictures/Videos

Description

Carl Schäfer (1838-1922) was the last representative of the Schäfer family of Swabian organ builders from Göppingen. In the year of his birth, his father Johann Heinrich Schäfer (1810-1887) moved from Göppingen to Heilbronn and established his own workshop there. He and and Carl Schäfer, wo received his training from his father and later took over his workshop, had soon made a name for themselves with the quality of their work. Therefore, Carl Schäfer war commissioned to build numerous new organs in the region, especially in the second half of the 19th century.

The typical sound of the Schäfer organs can be described as Swabian Romantic: Orchestral and smooth. The little organ of the Frauenkirche Neckarsulm, built in 1895, is one of Carl Schäfer's late works. It features the typical Schäfer style expressive but not aggressive Prinzipal 8' and Gedeckt 8', the calm Salicional 8', the Fugara 4' that allows the organist to lead the congregational singing and a Subbass 16'. Brighter and or more powerful sounds can be created by means of Octavkoppel and Tutti.

How to get this organ: Log in to your MyPROSPECTUM account (or create and activate it if you do not yet have one). Once you are logged in, you can create your personal license and download the Frauenkirche installation package.

Specification

Hauptwerk (C-f''')

Principal	8'
Fugara	4'
Salicional	8'
Gedeckt	8'

Pedal (C-d')

Subbass	16'

Pedalkoppel (HW-PD)
Octavkoppel (HW 4'-8')
Tutti

Tuning : Equal, f(a')=431 Hz

About this virtual organ

Version 1 of the virtual Frauenkirche organ for Hauptwerk 1 was released in March 2005 as the 4th PROSPECTUM virtual organ. Pipe recordings were made with the blower switched off so that there were no blower noises and pipes were fed with laminar wind from the bellow. When in mid 2023 experiments regarding the optimization of IR recording techniques were carried out in the Frauenkirche, the building blocks for a new version 2 could be obtained with little effort. So, this version 2 was created as a free organ for the HW community.

Frauenkirche 2 comes with 6 channel sound (channels pairs are called direct, indirect, church). In order to make the use of the 6 channels intuitive, a visual perspective control system was created. It features 7 perspective presets with pictures of the respective listening positions plus 3 programmable custom perspective combinations A,B and C so that you can create and fine-tune your own settings. Settings can be stored by using either the standard HW SET button or clicking on the Prospectum.com label at the bottom of the screen. In HW8, a click onto the Carl Schäfer Heilbronn 1895 label opens the 'intuitiv touch menu'.

Highlights of this virtual organ

The small but lovely 1895 Carl Schäfer organ of the Frauenkirche Neckarsulm
Size: One manual, pedal, 5 stops
Original keyboard compasses, no extensions
6 channel sound (direct, indirect, church) with intuitive perspective control system
No denoising applied - no denoising related loss of sound details
3 release samples per pipe
Sample resolution: 24bit/48kHz stereo
Action noises (keys, stops etc.) and blower noise (can be switched on/off) included
Ambient noise included (can be controlled via standard HW voicing features)
Versions for HW4, 5-7 and 8 available

Graphical User Interface

Sound demonstration

72-48-48: Joseph Renner junior (1868-1934): Nr. 28 from 30 Präludien, op. 48 (02:34)

Requirements

Hauptwerk versions: 4, 5-7, 8
RAM (24bit, 6 channels, lossless compression): 3.1 GB