Why do organs have two manuals?

[konaboy]

so much good stuff here, thank you!

I was researching this topic for a video idea, so will read carefully when I start preparing the script.

One comment jumped out at me though, I was missing something quite obvious, there is no need for keyboards & synths to have multiple manuals, when we can instead just stack them above each other in whatever configuration we want. Much more flexible, portable and probably affordable.

super thrilled with all the responses, and now i need to know i need to do some reading up on classical pipe organs!

[Lou_NC]

Konaboy,

For those of us who learned to play "keyboards" on a home spinet organ, it's completely obvious why there are two manuals and a bass pedalboard on an organ. It's so you can make music WITHOUT NEEDING A GUITAR PLAYER! Or, a drummer, if your Wurlitzer organ had a "rhythm unit" built into it (like mine did)!

 

I'm only half joking here about the guitar player..........I don't need a "backing track" to make music, if I have my left hand playing chords, my left foot tapping out bass, and a drum machine ticking along in the organ. I may be a fossil, but I still enjoy being a "one man band", even if I sound like elevator music to most people..........I'm way past worrying about being "cool" at this point in life! I never took theater organ style lessons.........but talk about a "one man band"! Those players definitely did not need a guitar player.......

 

I would actually flip the question around and say...........if it *doesn't* have two keyboards and a provision for bass pedal input (including separate drawbars for each keyboard, and the pedals), then by definition, it is *not* even an organ!

 

Lou

[Delaware Dave]

Ask Guido from GSI. It took him 6 years before he would produce an organ clone with only one manual. I believe his initial answer to "will you create a single manual Mojo?" was Nojo.

[El Lobo]

Not an answer to the question, but when I was traveling in Scotland, I got to play an ancient church pipe organ. The unique thing about it was that it was water-powered -- they had to turn on the water to power the bellows. Anyway, it was a gas gas gas to play a full pipe organ in a church with those huge pipes rumbling...

Yes, very true! I've had the same thrill whether it's playing a small pipe organ at a country church in rural Vermont, or playing the oldest 3-manual pipe organ in New England.

...

After I spend one entire day helping him tune every pipe, when we were all done to "reward" me -- I got to sit inside the pipe room while he played Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D Minor. Still, the musical highlight of my life even today! The inside and behind-the-scenes of a real pipe organ is just as impressive -- if not more so mechanically -- as the external view of the manuals and stops. If I recall, the bellows was 10' or 12' square and had its own room below the organ.

The water-powered pipe organ had a separate room down in the basement where the huge bellows were. There was an underground stream that ran through it and the church guy had to turn a spigot or something so the water would run through a pump and drive an arm up and down to move the bellows. Church guy said it was the only water-powered organ that he knew of. He was very proud to show it off. A couple of other church people were there. They were very nice. After I played the organ and we left, my wife said that as she was standing with the other church guy in the middle of the church, she said that church guy said about my playing, "He's got soul."