How to Voice Stops in GrandOrgue (Per-Pipe Volume & Tuning)

One stop too loud, one pipe slightly sharp? GrandOrgue’s Organ Settings dialog lets you voice any stop — or any individual pipe — by adjusting its volume (Amplitude/Gain) and pitch (in cents). Here is where to find it and how to use it safely.

In the pipe organ world, voicing is the craft of regulating each pipe so the whole instrument blends. GrandOrgue gives you a software version of that workbench: with an organ loaded, open Audio/Midi → Organ Settings. This dialog is the single place where you can retune the organ’s overall pitch, adjust the volume of any stop, and even correct individual pipes — all without touching the sample set’s original files.

What You Can Adjust in Organ Settings

• Overall pitch: shift the entire organ’s tuning up or down — useful when playing along with an instrument tuned to A=442 or a historic temperament recording.
• Per-stop volume: select any stop and change its Amplitude and/or Gain. Amplitude scales the sample playback level; Gain applies additional amplification. If a reed shouts over the flues, tame it here instead of avoiding the stop forever.
• Per-stop and per-pipe pitch: adjust tuning in cents (100 cents = one semitone). You can nudge a whole rank at once, or drill down to a single misbehaving pipe.
• “Ignore pitch info”: a checkbox for sample sets whose creators tuned the audio files directly instead of writing pitch metadata. Ticking it lets GrandOrgue’s temperament features work correctly with such sets.
• Per-stop load options: you can also override the global load settings for individual stops — handy for trimming memory use on huge organs without unloading the whole instrument.

Step-by-Step: Taming a Too-Loud Stop

1. Load the organ and pull the stop that bothers you. Play a few notes so its loudness is fresh in your ears.
2. Open Audio/Midi → Organ Settings.
3. In the stop list, select the offending stop.
4. Reduce its Amplitude in small steps (a few dB at a time), playing the same notes between adjustments. Small moves — our ears adapt quickly, and it is easy to overshoot.
5. When it sits right in the chorus, choose File → Save. Your voicing is stored in GrandOrgue’s settings folder and reapplied every time you load this organ.

Step-by-Step: Fixing a Sour Pipe

1. In Audio/Midi → Organ Settings, expand the stop down to the pipe level and select the individual pipe.
2. Adjust its pitch in cents — positive values sharpen, negative values flatten. A pipe that beats against its neighbors usually needs only 2–5 cents of correction.
3. Play the note, then the same note on the neighboring pipes, until the beating disappears.
4. File → Save to keep the correction.

Important: Your Tweaks Do Not Touch the Original Files

This is the part that surprises newcomers: voicing changes are stored in GrandOrgue’s own settings and cache folder (the location is shown in the Audio/Midi Settings dialog’s Options tab) — the downloaded organ files themselves are never modified. That means:

• You cannot “break” a sample set by voicing it. The Default button in the Organ Settings dialog restores factory values at any time.
• Your voicing does not travel with the organ: if you share the sample set files with a friend, they get the creator’s original voicing, not yours.
• If a sample set is updated by its creator, your stored voicing may no longer match the new samples — reset to defaults and re-voice after major updates.
• Respect the sample set’s license: voicing for your own playing is normal use, but do not redistribute someone else’s samples with your “improved” voicing baked in unless the license explicitly allows it.

FAQ: Voicing in GrandOrgue

Amplitude vs. Gain — which one should I change?

Start with Amplitude: it scales the stop’s level cleanly within the mix. Reach for Gain only when Amplitude’s range is not enough, since large gain boosts can push the output into clipping. If you hear distortion after boosting, back off and check the master volume too.

Will voicing survive a GrandOrgue update?

Your per-organ settings live in GrandOrgue’s settings files, which installers normally leave alone — but back them up before any major upgrade anyway (see the version history page for what each release changes). A settings backup takes ten seconds and has saved many organists’ carefully tuned registrations.

Can I voice a stop differently for each temperament?

Voicing (volume/pitch offsets) is independent of the temperament selected under Audio/Midi → Temperaments. Your cent-level pipe corrections apply on top of whatever temperament is active — correct pipes in equal temperament first, then experiment.

The dialog shows hundreds of pipes — do I really need to touch them all?

No. Voice at the stop level first; only descend to individual pipes when one specific note misbehaves. Ninety percent of real-world voicing is balancing stop volumes against each other.

Keep exploring: fixing latency in GrandOrgue if your tweaks reveal crackling you had not noticed before, the no-sound checklist if a stop goes mysteriously silent, and download the latest GrandOrgue to make sure you are voicing on a current build.