The organ as a wind instrument

Anna's great! Last year she played the Royal Albert Hall organ at a Bonobo electronic music concert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdyAF9M3XVw

I don't want to be "that guy" but a mate of mine is the music director is in his local church here in the UK, plays the organ and piano, is mostly self taught and is also gay... he's even going to be teaching me to play the organ later on this year (and I'm joining his choir for a bit of fun... he also knows I'm not religious at all and in his own words "faith is not a requirement")

All I'm saying is you just need to find the right church and person... most people will happily share their passions with equally passionate beginners, and churches are crying out for organ players, they are a dying breed.

I've got a second hand organ (trademark "Content", but there are more) at home with two manuals and (almost full) pedal. They're not expensive. There are three and four manual versions too. More than good enough to learn and practice. And no mistake: professional organists use these too, since practicing at a real organ is hard for them, too. Many (smaller) churches use similar organs instead of pipe organs, because of the economics.

> they're just intermediate representations of a full console with multiple manuals, pedalboard, couplers, reverberant room

They're near perfect recordings with all the features, e.g. https://www.sonusparadisi.cz/en/organs/netherlands/rotterdam...

If you want to hear what people play on their home setup: https://www.contrebombarde.com/concerthall/home/front

> While also lamenting the long history of exclusionary practices of the places these things exist.

Can you go into more detail as to these exclusionary practices? All organizations, all things really, are defined by both what they include and what they exclude. Nothing is fully inclusive, else that thing would have no meaning!

To be more concrete, How, were churches more exclusionary than other private or civic organizations of their times? When we judge the history of something, we really need to judge it in proper context, including by comparing to the society at large within the same time frame. On the whole, Christianity can be argued to be one of the most inclusive religions ever. It would have to be, else it couldn't have spread across the world like it did!

> The world isn't perfect, and as strong as the desire is to reduce things to a "good" or a "bad" the real world comes with confusing good and bad points that we don't have to average out into a final score.

I'm not sure what this sentence is supposed to be conveying, really. It's point is far too banal to be a nugget of wisdom. It's more like a clump of dirt of wisdom! The world isn't perfect? Thanks for the reminder! But we all have a choice as to how we interpret our world, and I'm suggesting that the primary emotion or feeling an organist should have towards churches is one of gratitude, at least while we're staying on topic and talking about organs.

I went down the rabbit hole on pipe organs some years back when a school I was working at didn't have working bells (ridiculous, I know) or synchronized clocks. The simplest organ pipe is basically a big-ass whistle. Besides the metal ones you see front and center, there are also wooden ones that are typically square in cross section and have a block and labium exactly like the recorder you may have been forced to play in elementary school. A recorder is basically a whistle with some extra holes so it can play different notes.

I got as far as building the pipe, buying a thrift-shop vacuum cleaner, hooking the hose out to the output end, scrounging the circuit board out of an extra USB keyboard and soldering a solid-state relay in place of the scroll lock LED (inspired by the bit in Cryptonomicon where the protagonist uses a keyboard LED as a Morse code output), and starting to hack some code together to turn the vacuum cleaner (via the keyboard/relay) on and off on a schedule before I decided that I wasn't going to become a teacher after all. I never did hook it all up.

All this to say: getting a single note instrument that makes some kind of noise and isn't tuned is ridiculously easy if you don't care about the noise you make creating the required airflow and don't involve a computer.