Heavenly Voices?

elektro80 · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 6:52 am Post subject: Heavenly Voices?

Choralcello ("Heavenly Voices") - This instrument was developed by Melvin Severy and his brother-in-law, George B. Sinclair, in Arlington Heights, Massachusetts, USA from 1888 to 1909 when it was debuted in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Choralcello was manufactured by the Choralcello Manufacturing Co. It was sold as an expensive home organ for social music recitals. The company was taken over by Farrington C. Donahue and A. Hoffman. As far as we know, at least 6 were sold.

Much like the Telharmonium, the Choralcello used an electromagnetic tone wheel to generate organ sounds. However the Choralcello went a step further and also had piano-like strings that were either struck with piano-type hammers or vibrated electromagnetically.

The Choralcello had two keyboards, an upper 64-note keyboard played the strings like a piano, and the lower 88-note keyboard played the tone wheels and activated electromagnets to vibrate the strings, having organ style stops to control the timbre by passing the sound through cardboard, hardwood, softwood, glass, steel, or "bass-buggy" spring resonators.

The Choralcello eventually incorporated into the instrument a player-piano styled paper roll device for recording and playing back performances, as well as a 32-note pedal board system. The entire machine was very large, taking up "two basements" with only the keyboards and speakers publicly visible.

elektro80 · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 6:55 am Post subject:

mosc · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 8:32 am Post subject:

I love that meter on the right side of the keyboard. It would be great to have meters like that on our new digital stuff. There are some cool meters on some of the VST and DXI plugins, like for some compressors. These are cool, but the real thing is much more satisfying.