Author: John Chivers via YouTube
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My dad was originally a piano tuner before he went into wartime service and then later became ordained as a vicar. At some point, he became interested in maintaining church organs too and in the village I was raised, he used to spend hours maintaining the church organ and made organ pipes at home too.
He loved his church organ music and it’s a love which I’ve inherited, even if I didn’t ultimately inherit his faith. The cultural impact of traditional church music on my own tastes has definitely been significant: from an appreciation of harmonies, well-crafted counterpoint vocal parts, interesting bass parts, excellent musicianship, and indeed, the sheer, awesome power of a church organ going at full tilt (all the stops out, or ‘tutti’). Mostly, it’s meant that I was attracted to rock music performed by musicians with a similar appreciation or musicians I respected.
I originally wrote and recorded this 17 years ago using the rather less sophisticated plug-ins available at the time, though the result was actually reasonable. However, I decided to recreate it with even better sounds available a couple of years ago, on Father’s Day. But I still wasn’t quite happy with the mix or the choice of organ pipe sound choices, so I’ve revisited it again, changed some of the sounds, and altered the mix.
For those interested in such things, it was created in Cubase using the Toccata VST and the M-Tron Pro VST. The former was used for the organ and the latter (the Mellotron voices) provided the choir.
Although I initially learnt piano as a child, I’m really a drummer, so there’s no particular playing prowess involved here.
Originally dedicated to Dad on what would have been Father’s Day in his 100th year, I’ll consider this a re-dedication. Had he heard this, it would have been one of the few pieces of music I played that he probably wouldn’t have minded. 🙂