ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From: Ken Evans, June 1998
RTOS was originally formed to rescue a Wurlitzer 4/21 (opus 1951)
from the luxurious downtown RKO Palace Theater, just before that
2916-seat
luxurious movie house fell to the wrecking ball of urban renewal.
That instrument, now a 4/22, was moved to the 2574-seat Auditorium
Theater (now
Auditorium Center) where it has been used to present more than 275
concerts for more than 300,000 attendees. 112 organists from the United
States,
Canada, United Kingdom and Australia have provided the music for
these events. Albums have been produced on this Wurlitzer by Tom
Grierson, Leonard
Mac Clain, Don Scott, Alan Mills, Dennis James, Hector Olivera,
Billy Nalle, Rob Calcaterra, Dick Leibert, Don Thompson, David Reese and
Robert
Wolfe.
From: Russ Shaner, April 2010
The RTOS Wurlitzer (Opus 1951 from 1928) had Suitable Bass on three manuals.
It did have ‘R” (release) pistons also.
I have been told by some of our ‘oldtimers’ that it worked in the 1960s but was of
little value (hard wired, senseless combinations, unreliable, etc).
When Carlton Smith restored the console in the late 1990s, because of the fervor with which we were
approaching ‘originality’ we had him carefully restore SB contacts on the stop tabs and make
appropriate wiring updates to track with the minor stop changes that were made at that time.
This was truly a waste of time & energy (his) and money (ours).
Sometime in the 1970s after the organ was moved to the Auditorium our technicians did some major rework
to the pistons and basically disconnected the SB although in a way that it could be reactivated if desired.
I tried switching in and using the SB and never could seem to make it work reliably.
They used a multi-section gang rotary switch that disabled the SB pistons and refunctioned the second touch of the accomp.
and great pistons.
The accomp 2nd touch pistons would fire the corresponding pedal
piston (they had increased the number of pedal ‘pistons’ from three to 10).
The great 2nd touch pistons became ‘collective’ generals and fired the corresponding pistons on the other three manuals and pedals.
(They had also increased the number of solo pistons to 10.)
By resetting the rotary switch this could be turned off or the suitable bass could be reactivated.
In later years I provided additional hardware that would allow the collectives to not affect corresponding
orchestral (bombarde) or solo settings on a piston by piston basis and I made it so the pedal pistons could
be controlled by first touch of the accomp pistons.
If you know anything about the SB system, even when it was disabled, it would cause the pedal stops to act weird
when pressing pistons. I finally found the wiring in the combination machine that caused this and had to disconnect it.
While some visiting artists made use of these ‘collective’ features many found them confusing and just
had me shut them off out of frustration.
The collective generals were truly a clumsy setup but as I say, I inherited it from my predecessors.
My attempts to make it more flexible did little to improve the situation.
This all was fortunately done away with when we installed our new Z-Tronics combo system a few years back.
We removed the “SB” and “C” pistons and added 20 ‘generals’. We also eliminated the 2nd touch on the three manuals that had them.