Those thoroughly nice chaps over at Samplephonics have released a very good completely FREE sample pack of the incredible Leeds Town Hall Organ, as played by Master of Music, Dr. Simon Lindley, who crafted the six presets available. It’s a HUGE download and a HUGE sound!
A spokesman at Samplephonics said:
“Everyone involved in the project worked long hours and for free, so we felt that it was only right to give away the fruits of our labour and hope that the spirit of this incredible instrument could spread throughout the world and help people to craft wonderful music that moves people to do good things.
We packaged the sounds up into a custom Kontakt 5 instrument with a lovely photo of the organ in all of it’s splendor, as well as sampler instruments for Kontakt 4, EXS24, Reason NN-XT and Ableton Sampler. We hope you enjoy making music and spread the word about this wonderful organ so others can too!”
Here’s what the 16 bit presets sound like: “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” by J S Bach, using Organ Preset no. 5 (Try this player first as the file hosted on Soundcloud below can be a bit slow to stream)
You can download this version of “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” at Soundcloud for FREE by clicking on the download icon in the top right hand corner of the Soundcloud player below:
So just how does it compare to the real thing? Judge for yourself.
Weighing in at over 3gb it can take a while to download, so for licenced Reason users, I have a quick fix:
Download 16 bit versions of the samples in six separate refill packs from howcanimakemusic.com.
Dave over at Samplephonics has kindly given me permission to do this, so it’s all above board. He explained:
“We wouldn’t be able to host it on our website as everything needs to be done in house, but feel free to share it with Reason users if you do make it.”
Note: To make it easier to upload and download, I have converted the original samples from 24 bit to 16 bit using Goldwave and split the Reason bits only into six separate refills of around 150-200mb each.
The first one, compatible with Reason 7.1 and for licenced Reason users only – can be downloaded from here:
Leeds Town Hall Organ Preset 1 of 6 Reason Refill
Preset 2 – Not loaded yet – please check back later
Leeds Town Hall Organ Preset 3 of 6 Reason Refill
Preset 4 – Not loaded yet
Preset 5 – Not loaded yet
Leeds Town Hall Organ Preset 6 of 6 Reason Refill
I plan to post links to the remaining individual refills for presets 4 to 6 here in due course. Start off with Presets 1 & 3 and see if you like them! Drop me an email (details on the Contact Us page) if you want the others.
For the historians amongst you, here’s some blurb on that fabulous old organ:
“The magnificent organ was built by Gray and Davison to the specification of Civic Organist, William Spark who held the appointment from 1860-1897. The 5 manual instrument was boasted to do ‘all that an orchestra could do but less expensively'”.
More at: Discovering Leeds – Organ Recitals
So why not head over to Samplephonics anyway, open an account and see what other goodies they have on offer? You can get the rest of the multiformat stuff directly from them if you want the other sampler formats.
PS A big shout out and thanks to that awesome guy Tomislav Zlatic at Bedroom Producer’s Blog for making me aware of this freebie’s existence.