Second Annual
Poor Man's Pipe Organ Convention
Granada Theatre in Old Town Kern
Bakersfield, California

This month's featured organ, already featured in a previous article, is the 4/24 Mighty WurliTzer Theatre Pipe Organ installed at the Granada Theatre in Old Town Kern, Bakersfield, California. In this article, we attend the Second Annual Poor Man's Pipe Organ Convention of 2008.

The tonal colors of this fine Theatre Pipe Organ are endless. There is magic that thrilled all who gave the old gal a go. Seen in the shot above is the console of the Granada Theatre's Mighty 4/24 Robert Morton/ WurliTzer Hybrid Theatre Pipe Organ..

Georgia

Farther Along

Hoop-A-Joop Revisited

We were able to capture many things that embodied the essence of a great time as everyone enjoyed this magnificent machine and the fine hospitality of Jim and Lucy Spohn.

The Bone Doctor enjoyed his second time on the bench of the Mighty Robert Morton/WurliTzer. He played for a couple of hours total during the event and selected many tunes not normally heard on a Theatre Pipe Organ including some old timey mountain gospel music and a few modern songs.

Here, we see Cyrus Roton at the console. Cyrus entertained us with a lot of great music including many standards and show pieces.

Traveling down from Canada for the second time, Russ Ashworth enjoyed a great deal of time on the bench, playing his favourites such as One Fine Day and The Blue Danube.

The real star of the convention appearing for his second time was Greg Rister, who played a silent movie and many great traditional theatre organ arrangements including songs like Speakeasy.

On Saturday, May 5th at 8AM, the doors of the Granada Theatre in Old Town Kern, Bakersfield opened to greet theatre organ enthusiasts to this second annual event of historic perportions. Representing Walnut Hill once again were Cyrus Roton, the Bone Doctor, and Russ Ashworth, Ernest Todd, and Penny Hust.

The Walnut Hill Production Team attended and had the cameras and recorders rolling to document the event. We made some recordings using the Samson Zoom H4 and took hundreds of photos using two digital SLR cameras, our trusty Canon Power Shot S2-IS and the Kodak D70 belonging to Fred Willis. We were unable to get video, however, because the laptop was not available as a file repository. Some of these are posted below. There are more to follow. Stay tuned as we sort through this new material and post more here in the days ahead.

Dthe Convention, fellow Featured Artist Bone Doctor took the bench of this great instrument to play the following selections for you to enjoy.

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Greg Rister blew our socks off as he played the huge instrument in concert and silent movies with masterful skill.

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These recordings were made live using a Zoom H4 digital audio recorder provided by the Founding Father of Walnut Hill Productions, Fred Willis. There is audience and other racket made by the huge beast which is evident in these tracks. We chose not to edit out this extra spice so as to give the same ambiance to the listener that we experienced during this informal event.

The recorder was placed at front row stage center directly on one of the seat cushions. The arms of the seat acted as gobos which greatly increased the left-to-right channel separation. The Main chamber is in the left channel while the Solo chamber is in the right channel. Once the tracks were uploaded to the computer at the Office of Operations, each was treated to the following post edit sequence:

1. Open the track in Sonic Foundry SoundForge 6.
2. Remove low frequency rumble below 20Hz to correct DC offset.
3. Normalize each channel to -3dB.
4. Run Waves MaxxBass to restore the bottom octave.
5. Run Waves L3 Ultra Maximizer to make the signal broadcast ready.
6. Run Waves Noise Reduction to eliminate any electrical noise.
7. Normalize the track to -0.3dB for maximum saturation.
8. Fade in the head and fade out the tail.
9. Add two seconds of silence at the head.
10. Save the track and open in Windows Media Encoder 9.
11. Save the file as a 128KB/sec streaming WMA file.

We have found this procedure to yeald a file that streams well over most internet connections and plays back at the loudest possible volume with the least amount of noise with no distortion in the signal. The resulting files are good enough to burn to CD once stored on the remote computer after a download.

Since the recorder was set up to mic the room and not the organ directly, the listeners get to hear what we heard, as if they were sitting in the best seat in the house. It must be noted that only 20 of the 24 ranks were under wind when these tracks were cut. We are planning a future session after all ranks are winded some time next year before the move to Sweden.