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The regal is a small portable organ, furnished with beating reeds and having two bellows. [1] The instrument enjoyed its greatest popularity during the Renaissance. The name was also sometimes given to the reed stops of a pipe organ, and more especially the vox humana stop.
The sound of the regal is produced by brass reeds held in resonators. [1] The length of the vibrating portion of the reed determines its pitch and is regulated by means of a wire passing through the socket, the other end pressing on the reed at the proper distance. The resonators in the regal are not intended to reinforce the vibrations of the beating reed or of its overtones (as in the reed pipes of the organ), but merely to form an attachment to keep the reed in place without interfering with its function. A common compass was C/E--c′′′ (four octaves, with a short octave in the bass), though this was by no means standardized. Most regals were placed on a table to be played, and required two people—one to play the instrument, and another to pump the bellows.
Michael Praetorius (1618) mentions a larger regal used in the court orchestras of some of the German princes, more like a positive organ, containing reeds at 4′, 8′, and even sometimes 16′ pitch, and having two bellows behind the case. These regals were used not only at banquets but often in place of positive organs in churches. A very small regal, sometimes called a Bible regal because it could be separated into sections and folded up like a book, was also mentioned by the same writer, who stated that these little instruments had an unpleasantly harsh tone due to their tiny resonators, which were not quite an inch long. He states that they were first made in Nuremberg and Augsburg.
In England and France, the word "regal" was sometimes applied to reed stops on the organ; Mersenne (1636) states that the word was applied at that time to the vox humana stop. [1] According to Praetorius, the reed stops of pipe organs required constant tuning; he emphasized the fact that the pitch of the stop fell in summer and rose in winter. The pitch of the other stops rose in summer and fell in winter.
Because of civil wars and the ravages of time, very few antique regals survive. They were often mentioned in wills and inventories, such as the list of Henry VIII's musical instruments made after his death by Sir Philip Wilder (British Library Harley MS 1415, fol. 200 seq.), in which no fewer than thirteen pairs of single and five pairs of double regals are mentioned (although at that period, "pair" referred to a single instrument). Claudio Monteverdi scored for the regals in his operas, and the instrument was described and illustrated by Sebastian Virdung in 1511, Martin Agricola in 1528, and Othmar Luscinius in 1536. In England, as late as the reign of George III, there was the appointment of tuner of the regals to the Chapel Royal.
Drawings of the reeds of regals and other reed pipes, as well as of the instrument itself, are given by Praetorius (pl. iv., xxxviii.).
The regal may be seen as the ancestor of the harmonium, the reed organ, and the various varieties of "squeezebox" such as the accordion, the concertina, and the Bandoneón.
Bagpipes are a woodwind instrument using enclosed reeds fed from a constant reservoir of air in the form of a bag. The Great Highland bagpipes are well known, but people have played bagpipes for centuries throughout large parts of Europe, Northern Africa, Western Asia, around the Persian Gulf and northern parts of South Asia.
The uilleann pipes are the characteristic national bagpipe of Ireland. Earlier known in English as "union pipes", their current name is a partial translation of the Irish language terms píobaí uilleann, from their method of inflation. There is no historical record of the name or use of the term uilleann pipes before the 20th century. It was an invention of Grattan Flood and the name stuck. People mistook the term 'union' to refer to the 1800 Act of Union; this is incorrect as Breandán Breathnach points out that a poem published in 1796 uses the term 'union'.
A pitch pipe is a small device used to provide a pitch reference for musicians. Although it may be described as a musical instrument, it is not typically used to play music as such. Technically, it is a harmonica; however, it lacks many characteristics of harmonicas.
Hornbostel–Sachs or Sachs–Hornbostel is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, and first published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in 1914. An English translation was published in the Galpin Society Journal in 1961. It is the most widely used system for classifying musical instruments by ethnomusicologists and organologists. The system was updated in 2011 as part of the work of the Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) Project.
The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurized air through the organ pipes selected from a keyboard. Because each pipe produces a single pitch, the pipes are provided in sets called ranks, each of which has a common timbre and volume throughout the keyboard compass. Most organs have many ranks of pipes of differing timbre, pitch, and volume that the player can employ singly or in combination through the use of controls called stops.
In music, the organ is a keyboard instrument of one or more pipe divisions or other means for producing tones, each played from its own manual, with the hands, or pedalboard, with the feet.
The sheng is a Chinese mouth-blown polyphonic free reed instrument consisting of vertical pipes.
A free reed aerophone is a musical instrument that produces sound as air flows past a vibrating reed in a frame. Air pressure is typically generated by breath or with a bellows. In the Hornbostel–Sachs system, it is number: 412.13. Free reed instruments are contrasted with non-free or enclosed reed instruments, where the timbre is fully or partially dependent on the shape of the instrument body, Hornbostel–Sachs number: 42.
Overblowing is the manipulation of supplied air through a wind instrument that causes the sounded pitch to jump to a higher one without a fingering change or the operation of a slide. Overblowing may involve a change in the air pressure, in the point at which the air is directed, or in the resonance characteristics of the chamber formed by the mouth and throat of the player.
The Vox humana is a short-resonator reed stop on the pipe organ, so named because of its supposed resemblance to the human voice. As a rule, the stop is used with a tremulant, which undulates the wind supply, causing a vibrato effect. The vox humana is intended to evoke the impression of a singing choir or soloist, though the success of this intent depends as much upon the acoustics of the room in which the organ speaks as it does the voicing of the pipes. It is almost invariably at 8′ pitch, though on theater organs it is not uncommon to encounter a chorus of vox humana stops at 8′ and 4′ pitch, with the addition of a 16′ acting as a pedal stop.
An organ stop is a component of a pipe organ that admits pressurized air to a set of organ pipes. Its name comes from the fact that stops can be used selectively by the organist; each can be "on", or "off".
A flue pipe is an organ pipe that produces sound through the vibration of air molecules, in the same manner as a recorder or a whistle. Air under pressure is driven through a flue and against a sharp lip called a labium, causing the column of air in the pipe to resonate at a frequency determined by the pipe length. Thus, there are no moving parts in a flue pipe. This is in contrast to reed pipes, whose sound is driven by beating reeds, as in a clarinet. Flue pipes are common components of pipe organs.
An organ pipe is a sound-producing element of the pipe organ that resonates at a specific pitch when pressurized air is driven through it. Each pipe is tuned to a specific note of the musical scale. A set of organ pipes of similar timbre comprising the complete scale is known as a rank; one or more ranks constitutes a stop.
The pump organ is a type of free-reed organ that generates sound as air flows past a vibrating piece of thin metal in a frame. The piece of metal is called a reed. Specific types of pump organ include the reed organ, harmonium, and melodeon. The idea for the free reed was imported from China through Russia after 1750, and the first Western free-reed instrument was made in 1780 in Denmark.
A portative organ, also known during Italian Trecento as the organetto, is a small pipe organ that consists of one rank of flue pipes, sometimes arranged in two rows, to be played while strapped to the performer at a right angle. The performer manipulates the bellows with one hand and fingers the keys with the other. The portative organ lacks a reservoir to retain a supply of wind, thus it will only produce sound while the bellows are being operated. The instrument was commonly used in European secular music from the 12th to the 16th centuries.
A positive organ is a small, usually one-manual, pipe organ that is built to be more or less mobile. It was common in sacred and secular music between the 10th and the 18th centuries, in chapels and small churches, as a chamber organ and for the basso continuo in ensemble works. The smallest common kind of positive, hardly higher than the keyboard, is called chest or box organ and is especially popular nowadays for basso continuo work; positives for more independent use tend to be higher.
Sordun is a family of archaic wind instruments blown by means of a double reed
A reed pipe is an organ pipe that is sounded by a vibrating brass strip known as a reed. Air under pressure is directed towards the reed, which vibrates at a specific pitch. This is in contrast to flue pipes, which contain no moving parts and produce sound solely through the vibration of air molecules. Reed pipes are common components of pipe organs.
This article describes the process and techniques involved in the tuning of a pipe organ. Electronic organs typically do not require tuning.
The claviorgan is a combination of a stringed instrument and an organ. Its origin is uncertain but its history can be traced back to the fifteenth century.
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