Pipe Organs

I have been involved with pipe organs for at least 40 years. As a member of the Theatre Organ Society of Canberra who own and maintain a Compton Theatre pipe organ (see the console above). You can find out more about them at their web site at: TOSA (ACT) In addition, I belonged to a group of mostly TOSA members who restored a fairground organ, a Gebruder Bruder organ(see above right) which is over 100 years old and the only one known to use the original book music ( like a piano roll only it uses stacks of punched cards linked together) . It was originally installed in the carousel (merry-go-round) currently located in Garema Place in Canberra's Civic Centre. This organ has been almost completely rebuilt . It had an airing at the National Fairground Organ Festival held in Canberra in 1998 and sounded great.Since that time, a new facade was reconstructed using some of the remaining scrollwork and a photograph of the original from Germany and the fully restored organ was presented to the public at Commonwealth Park, Canberra during the Canberra centenary celebrations in 2013 and was handed back to the Government in 2014 Calliope The term Calliope was originally used as the name of one of the greek muses involved in heroic poetry. In the pipe organ world it was a steam operated pipe organ, often found on American paddle steamers.. Nowadays calliopes are usually operated by compressed air. A couple of years ago, one of the TOSA members floated the idea of building an air operated Calliope. This became quite a challenge so I set to to build one. Boy what a challenge!. The whole thing had to be built from scratch. The most difficult task was making the pipes but you can find out How to build your own calliope- Now including how to make it play MIDI files- click here! Because of the large amount of interest generated in the calliope project, you can now download the Adobe Acrobat file containing the instructions . The file is about 400Kb Click here to download NEW STREET ORGAN ! Since building the Calliope, I have now built a street organ that had both reed and string pipes Click here for construction details You can also download the Adobe Acrobat file instructions for the street organ construction Click here to download The Sounds of the Calliope and Street Organ The Calliope tunes are short excerpts of Wave files of about 500K. The street organ tunes are full MP3 format ranging from a few K to over a 1mb ( Attaque and Blaze Away) The Pennsylvania Polka (Calliope) Alexander's Ragtime band (Calliope) The Teddybear's Picnic (Calliope) The following Street organ tunes illustrate the capabilities of the organ from simple tunes like Dixie and Bubbles that were designed for 26 note organs to full blown tunes like Attaque and Blaze Away Attaque (Street Organ) Bubbles (Street Organ) Blaze Away (Street Organ) Dixie (Street Organ) If you want more information, or have any comments, please e-mail me