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What is Hauptwerk?
Hauptwerk is a computer organ system - a virtual organ that takes full advantage of the enormous processing power of the latest home computers to provide very complex pipe organ modelling and per-pipe sound shaping, whilst maintaining the enormous polyphony necessary to model a pipe organ successfully.
At its core, Hauptwerk is a very powerful and high-performance specialist software sampler, specifically designed and optimised for modelling pipe organs.
The system is built around the philosophy of using at least one large sample per pipe (typically 3-10 seconds), all including release samples to record the decay of each pipe accurately, and recorded in CD quality or better. All samples are held in memory to achieve a much higher polyphony for a given hardware cost than is possible with disk-streaming, commonly used in samplers. Unlike generic software or hardware samplers, Hauptwerk has complex physical and acoustic models specifically designed to reproduce the features and sound of a pipe organ, and is thus able to achieve much more realistic results. It is also designed for a much higher polyphony than generic samplers.
But Hauptwerk is much more than a sampler. It also models all of the physical controls and functional details of a pipe organ. The main console screen shows you a photo-realistic representation of the console, and allows you full control over the virtual organ in the same way that you would control the original instrument. Everything behaves as you would expect; stops, couplers, the programmable combination system, swell pedals, crescendo pedals, ventils, second touch, bass and melody couplers, and so on.
What's more, in Hauptwerk every control and function can be fully controlled by MIDI, and Hauptwerk can send MIDI output to control moving/illuminated draw-knobs/tabs, control real external ranks of pipes or hardware expanders, and even control LCD panels to show labels for each draw-knob and piston. If you wish, Hauptwerk can be fully integrated into a MIDI organ console and operate as its 'engine', with comprehensive real-time per-pipe voicing facilities, multi-channel audio output and all of the features you would need from a high-end system.(1)
But perhaps the biggest appeal to many of Hauptwerk's users is that you are not restricted to a single set of organ sounds. Have a look at some of the amazing sample sets created for Hauptwerk. Some of the greatest organs in the world can be played virtually, and we have worked with sample set producers over a period of some years to make this possible for the first time ever.
Hauptwerk is available for Apple Macs (both Intel and PowerPC Macs) as well as Windows PCs. If you are a Windows studio user, Hauptwerk can also run as VSTi plug-in, enabling it to be integrated conveniently within Cubase and other major VSTi hosts, or used with virtual MIDI cable drivers with non-VSTi sequencers. Currently the (VSTi) plug-in version of Hauptwerk is only available on Windows platforms, but a plug-in version is planned for the Mac platform soon.
Because Hauptwerk is designed to give incredible performance and realism, a fairly powerful, modern computer will give best results. See the recommended computer specs page for details if you are considering buying a new computer. We think that's a small price to pay for the results you will get.
However, you can still use Hauptwerk on older computers with excellent results and a huge polyphony by simply disabling some of the audio realism features such as interpolation and per-pipe filters. Even with only 512 MB of memory you can still use Hauptwerk very effectively with smaller sample sets, or by choosing to load only certain ranks or to use loss-less memory compression on certain ranks of larger sample sets.
Unless you are buying a pre-configured Hauptwerk-based system, it also helps if you have some basic experience with computers and MIDI.
(1) MIDI output, real-time voicing, the LCD panel system and multi-channel audio output are only available in the Advanced Edition of Hauptwerk.
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