First Baptist Church | Owatonna, MN

The 1893 J.W. Steere organ in the First Baptist Church of Owatonna, Minnesota has a long history - the organ was installed with funds donated by the famous Pillsbury family, and has served the church for nearly 130 years.

The instrument is a typical small parish instrument of that era, with plenty of 8' tone, lots of options for color, and built sturdily to work and last with minimal maintenance. Also notable is the fact that the organ is mostly original and intact - it does have an electric blower, but one can still see the controls for the original water machine and there is still a stop knob to signal the bellows, hearkening back to the days of manual pumping.

The organ is still used for weekly services, and is in remarkably good condition considering its age. We sampled in 96kHz/24 bit, and downsampled to 48/24 after noise reduction was complete.

This continues our series of historic American organs - we are grateful to church organist Drew Meyer and the church board for allowing us to digitally preserve the sound of this organ for the future. Do note a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the sample set will go back to the church.

Encryption

The samples are offered in 48kHz/24bit resolution. The tremulants are all sampled. Hauptwerk 5 and higher required (incl. HW6). The sample set uses simple encryption, and does not require an iLok update

The sample set is offered in the Surround variant (4 channels). Although the reverb time of the room was minimal, and the sound of the ambient channels mostly indistinguishable from the direct channels, we chose to include a second perspective, as the further position does give an impression of the space and a richer sound. The sample set responds very well to added reverb via the HW convolution feature. Below is a screenshot of one of our favorite reverb settings in HW:

Reverb time

The reverb time is ca. 0.5~1 second.

Keyboards, pedalboard

The original compass of the keyboards is 58 keys. The original compass of the pedal division is 27 notes,

Requirements

RAM consumption

24-bit, other settings default: 3 GB

	GREAT ORGAN		SWELL ORGAN
8'	Open Diapason	8'	Violin Diapason
8'	Dulciana	8'	Salicional
8'	Melodia	8'	Stopd Diapason
4'	Octave	4'	Flute Harmonique
4'	Flute D’Amour	2'	Flautino
2 2/3'	Twelfth	8'	Oboe (TF)
2'	Fifteenth	8'	Bassoon
			Tremolo
	PEDAL ORGAN		COUPLERS
16'	Bourdon		Great to Pedal
			Swell to Pedal
			Swell to Great