My friend, the organist Jakob Schönborn-Dietz invited me to check out the acoustics at his church St. Johannis Baptist in the heart of Jena.
The space is rather dry sounding, especially obvious with an organ of this size. The question was if it could be improved electronically.
So I visited with some microphones, audio interface and laptop. We explored the interior of the organ and placed two spots.
The two mics were fed into a Metric Halo 2882 (+ DSP & 3D) audio interface and into the Cockos Reaper DAW where AudioEase Altiverb did it’s magic.
The resultant output was time delay compensated and routed to three speakers facing towards the wall to increase diffusion.
After tweaking the direct-reverberant ratio, experimenting with different impulse responses and carefully adjusting the levels Jakob and I were very happy with the results. The audience of our improvised evening session was also very appreciative of the results of the first trial run of this “sonic spaceXtension”.
