Warrington Cavaillé-Coll Sample set from Sonus Paradisi

The organ was built by the French organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1870 for the private Hall of John Turner Hopwood, later moved to Ketton (1875), finally transferred to the Warrington Hall (1926), which is a theatre today.

The organ has 3 manuals and 49 speaking stops, including a 32' in pedal, but it is still a chamber organ, voiced originally to fit a small private room. Therefore, the sound of the sample set is also well suited for home use in Hauptwerk. It sounds amazingly natural in a living room. This sample set is a real revelation because it is so unique among other Cavaillé-Coll productions, and also because the organ is now somewhat forgotten, hardly used for any kind of public performance. Its unusual sound is therefore known only to a small group of specialists. The sample set is

now available from Sonus Paradisi.

More details, including the specification and audio demo samples of the instrument may be found on the Sonus Paradisi web pages.

The vol.1 is free for everyone to download and test. It features 21 stops of the organ without any limitations. It forms a typical small Cavaillé-Coll organ - for free.

Well done, Mr. Zurek! I have downloaded the demo set and it is an absolutely delightful medium-sized French Romantic instrument.
It's such a shame that the real Warrington instrument is treated with such apathy by its community.

The Warrington organ is probably best known by a famous gravure of Cavaillé-Coll's demonstration hall. The history of this organ is very well written on the website of Sonus Paradisi (SP). When the sample set was released, I immediately bought it. And I am very impressed.

The quality of the samples is superb – SP know how to sample an organ. It is also striking how well intonated this organ is. The sound is very delicate and subtitle. No single stop sounds the same: every stop has his own character, and all stops are evenly beautiful and unique. It is very nice that all stops of the Positive and Recit are also recorded with tremulo, and the Positive has a swell box.

This organ is well-suited for the more intime French romantic repertoire, e.g. Viernes 24 Pièces en style libre, Francks l’Organiste and many works of Guilmant. Music like the symphonies of Vierne and Widor demand a larger organ in a larger acoustics, e.g. the Caen sample set.

Overall I am very impressed by this sample set. The sample quality is very good, and the organ excels in the intime French romantic organ works.

I've just downloaded the demo. It is brilliant - Lefebure-Wely and Franck sound right at home. In Warrington, of all places.

Congratulations to SP for making the demo free and a complete instrument. It really is the only way to test a sample set properly - and it's no accident that I have now bought several SP sets as a result of that policy. I wish all sample set makers did the same.

After a few weeks of playing this set, I haven’t wanted to play anything else. Unlike the large Cavaille-Coll HW organs (which are wonderful) Warrington sounds completely plausible in my studio. The fact that it started out as a studio organ makes it seem very at home in a smaller room.

Warrington has every required Cavaille-Coll timbre (although a tierce would be nice), but it has a clarity that is missing in the larger sets. As someone who plays through studio monitors (never through headphones) this is the sample set that I have been waiting for for 12 years.

Congratulations Jiri, it’s brilliant.

Thank you for your nice words. Indeed, from the beginning, I was thinking of adding a Tierce to the Récit, and a Bombarde 32 to the pedal. I hesitated a little, not to spoil the existing form of the instrument, but now, after hearing that the Warrington sample set is well received in the Hauptwerk community, I will add these two stops as soon as I can. Probably during the next 14 days or so.

I will add these two stops on the "simple" screen, where there is some space for additional stops. I am not sure adding them to the "photorealistic" screens, because graphically it does not fit.

Warrington Cavaillé-Coll Sample Set from Sonus Paradisi was enriched by additions of two stops.

A Tierce was added to the Récit for a Cornet Séparé, and a Basson 32' was added to the Pedal. Users were hoping for these two stops, and indeed, both stops are useful. The tierce sound is indispensable to French organ literature and was completely absent from the organ. The 32-foot pedal register is useful, but its addition presented some difficulty. The pedal is already rather strong, and the addition of another strong register could lead to an unbalance between manuals and pedal. I therefore decided not to add the powerful Bombarde 32', which would perhaps suit a large cathedral organ, but the submissive Basson 32', which with its restrained sound is suited to the overall "chamber" character of the Warrington instrument. This register very appropriately adds fundamental to the lower end of the spectrum, but does not increase the overall volume of the pedal.

How to upgrade:

Existing customers can upgrade (for free) from within the user zone ("My Products") using the existing Warringon links. It is necessary to download and install both volumes! Download and install vol. 1 (the Core package), and also the vol. 2 (the pipes). Both the volumes should be already present in "My Products" from the time of the purchase of the sample set.

The new version should be compatible with the combinations saved using an older Warrington versions, because the internal IDs of stops were not changed. Therefore, the new version can be installed on top of the existing Warrington version. However, I must point out that the first load of the new sample set version will take a long time, because Hauptwerk needs to resolve all the changes in settings between the old and new versions. Hauptwerk may seem "frozen" during this operation for several minutes.