Modartt Organteq 2

Modartt revisit the richly complex world of the pipe organ, reducing one of the world’s largest instruments to a mere 30MB.

The pipe organ, with all its religious, ceremonial and imposing musical connotations, is an instrument seemingly as old as time. Its recent starring role in Hans Zimmer’s score for Interstellar re‑established its cinematic potential, but its huge importance in wider musical history predates that by probably 1000 years at least.

The majority of mainstream modern digital representations of pipe organs are either dire, limited, or both of those things together. Stage keyboards typically have one or two garish presets. A few general sample libraries do better, but most only offer a menu of preconfigured registrations of a single instrument. Doing a digital version of a pipe organ properly involves offering each of its single‑timbre ‘stops’ (of which there may be dozens) separately, and allowing the player to explore combinations of them. You ideally also want some reflection of the fact that real organs are often made up of several separate physical ‘divisions’, played by different keyboards. Some might have a swell mechanism: a Venetian blind‑style set of louvres operated by a foot pedal, allowing variable degrees of acoustic enclosure, for expressive purposes. Meanwhile, the subtle real‑world effects relating to the way potentially thousands of pipes are supplied with air or ‘wind’ is a science in itself.

For a long time, only specialist, large and expensive electronic organs principally meant for installation in churches or professional organists’ practice rooms have tackled these challenges. But the situation is changing, and Organteq 2 by the French company Modartt is one of the most recent software‑based virtual organs on the market, putting the colossal complexity of the real thing in the hands of the general user, and for an affordable price.

Organteq Basics

Like Modartt’s piano‑oriented counterpart Pianoteq, Organteq’s sound production is based on physical modelling, not sample replay. That offers advantages in mimicking real‑life acoustic interactions and allowing for tweaking of individual organ sounds (and even individual pipes) in a way that is tricky or impossible for sample‑based competitors. It also means Organteq is a minuscule presence on your computer: at an almost laughable 30MB it’ll be dwarfed by many a mobile phone JPEG. On the flip‑side, you need a modern computer to run it well. Big chords played on big registrations on my M1 Max‑chipped Mac got all the processing cores rippling away nicely.

On launching the software, what you see is to a large extent what you get. The basic multitimbral engine and the way that sounds are constructed are based around the three five‑octave keyboards that are visible, and the 32‑note pedalboard underneath. The naming of the keyboards (or, in more technical parlance, ‘manuals’) follows historical and geographical convention. By default, because Modartt are a French company, they’re Récit, Grand Orgue, Positif and Pédale from top to bottom. A user preference lets you switch to German or English equivalents.

The keyboard and pedalboard layout is non‑negotiable, but the stops (the individual ranks of pipes of different character, quality and pitch) available to each manual are user‑configurable. That’ll be particularly important if you’re aiming to recreate an existing organ, or want to explore certain kinds of stops. The middle keyboard can play up to 20 stops of its own, and the others (and the pedals) 10. Any keyboard can be coupled to any other though, so playing the lower keyboard could potentially trigger all pulled stops on the upper at the same time. And there are even more interesting possibilities that go beyond what typically happens in reality: more on those in the ‘Couples Therapy’ box.

Now is as good a time as any to note that Organteq 2’s MIDI implementation and mapping options are excellent. If you are in the ideal (and lucky) position of owning a three‑keyboard/manual controller (or multi‑controller setup) with a pedalboard, you’ll be all set. With only a single controller keyboard your options are certainly more limited, but it’s up to you whether you devote it to one Organteq keyboard or (with an‑88 note controller, say) dial in a split in Organteq so that the lower couple of octaves play pedals and the upper octaves one of the keyboards. These mappings can be flexibly configured, saved, and easily recalled, to adapt to using Organteq in all sorts of playing scenarios. Also, many types of MIDI message (note, CC, Program Change, MMC, pitch‑bend and aftertouch) can be mapped to pretty much any parameter or other action. There’s a dedicated page for setting that up; alternatively, right‑clicking a control like a stop knob will often pop up a MIDI Learn dialogue box.

A clearer overview of proceedings, if you can live without the virtual keyboards, is the ‘Jamb’ view. It has the advantage of showing stops with their full names. The button part is also detachable, and if you can get it on a touchscreen will give you a stop selection experience closer to a real organ. There’s even a Double Jamb for those who’d like to surround their keyboards with stop controls.

Pulling Out The...