A tracker organ like this and a sailing ship of the line are the peak of pre-industrial technology. Having Hub Nut as everyman, standing in for us, makes this a special treat. Thank you.

This video is exploring the absolute limits of a single camera setup. The sound is great. I've watched it on a 40" TV through Chromecast instead of my phone. Absolutely loved it.

What a wonderful video.Remember when the BBC and ITV would have done a programme along these lines? I do, but they haven’t done so for many years and would not now, maybe BBC Radio 3 would, but not TV. This is where channels like yours are just so important. Enthusiasm,and real experts, introducing a wider audience to magnificent culture and machines/instruments. You should be very proud of this episode, it’s outstanding!

What a wonderful instrument. How about some more off piste videos? I really enjoyed this one. Thanks to everyone involved.

Wow! I love the Symphony hall - outstanding acoustics- I’ve seen both Tony Bennett and Wynton Marsalis perform there and both had the PA system turned off for a piece of music. You could hear Wynton’s breaths as he played even without amplification. Tony Bennett simply didn’t need a mic - his voice filled the hall.

You get to do the best things !

Imagine the same content with a very expensive professional crew (multiple cameras, lighting, etc.) and then on national television. Ian driving around the country in a Citroën to find out about old and almost forgotten mechanicals. I would definitely watch that.

Great vlog but I bet nothing beats being there and having that sound reverberate through your chest !

Tremolo is a variation in volume; vibrato a variation in pitch. Leo Fender got it the wring way around on his guitars and amps in the 1950s and everyone's been confused since! (the 'tremolo' bar on a Stratocaster causes vibrato; the 'vibrato' channel on a Fender amp is actually tremolo)

My late father who would have been 100 this year on July 15 would have loved this he used to be a Church Organist.He loved pipe organs very much and could play without music so by ear such a gifted man missed and loved by all who knew him 😊💗😀😉

That was great, I am booking in for a lunchtime recital at the Town Hall. Two stops on the train, no excuse not to.

A totally unexpected hubnote and what a wonderful note it is 😮 Definitely would be great to go on the behind the scenes tour Lovely content

Brilliant. Watched on a large TV with a soundbar, it is amazing.

The Symphony Hall Organ was inaugurated on Friday 19 October 2001 as part of Symphony Hall’s 10th Birthday celebrations & was paid for by public donation. It was designed and built by hand using traditional craftsmanship by Johannes Klais Orgelbau, a long-established family firm from Bonn that has an enviable worldwide reputation. 🙂

Wow, hidden depths. You should check out the organ in Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavik Iceland. It's a stunning piece of engineering

What a great video, as an ex Brummie ( now living in Sunny Worthing) been in symphony hall so many times, never been as lucky as you to experience such a wonderful instrument as such close quarters. Thank you for sharing. A truly Bostin video

A fantastic video, feeling the Goosebumps when the organ was playing, would love to hear a concert here.

What a magnificent auditorium, and such an incredible organ!

The symphony hall is great to watch Australian Pink Floyd in (yes i did watch a concert in there). The specially tuned acoustics made everything so clear to hear.

Instant goose bumps! What an amazing wonderfull and divine instrument it is! Thanks Ian 🙏

What a joy playing on this organic air instrument. Wish it was me playing😊

A long time subscriber to HubNut and I'm searching for organ music and you come up. You don't half get around Ian!

That was absolutely awesome. What an experience to be in charge of such an immense machine. You will cherish that moment Ian. Thanks to Colin for being so generous with his time, the tour guide and Miss Hubnut on the camera. 👍😄

Excellent stuff, and lovely to see Shep on your camera too, he's a wonderful character. Can confirm - the roof goes a long way up from the organ boxes, I've climbed it on the ladders several times. I've set the stage console often, and it's always fun when you have to test the organ works :D

Excellent. Was hoping for 'In The garden of Eden', by Iron butterfly. Lol.

You’re living your dreams, so good.

It must have been amazing to stand in front of them pipes playing, with all the vibrations going through your body

Literally HubNotes ❤❤

Wow that was amazing; who knew there were so many pipes! 😱Colin did an amazing job! 🐛

What a thing! I want to go see, and hear, that. Thanks so much.

Love the intro reminds of alll the Dracula movie theme's.😊 But organs are such incredible instruments. They can mimic orchestras and so many instruments..

Amazing! I wouldn't have fancied the job of installing it. Just thinking about it made my brain hurt, Lol.

Absolutely fascinating 😎

Absolutely magnificent! What an absolutely beautiful organ, the sound is absolutely beautiful. The demonstration brings out the beauty of music. The young man is absolutely talented, and you yourself Ian, played magnificently! Thank you very much Ian, and Carly (cannot forget Miss @HubNut!)

What a magnificent instrument. Strongly recommended that you watch a KZfaq video of the organ of St David’s Cathedral (Wales). When the 32ft Bombards play it rocks your socks!

Absolutely stunning! Definitely one of the nicest organs i've ever heard.

This is an endlessly fascinating video and Colin seems to be a thoroughly likeable chap.

Incredibly interesting, great video Ian 👍

What a fascinating video. Hybrid electrics and mechanical gubbins. The engineering and design that must have gone into this makes my brain want to burst let alone all the tuning of the pipes and effects. It's quite a recent organ though, inaugurated on Friday 19 October 2001 as part of Symphony Hall’s 10th Birthday celebrations. All done and built using traditional craftsmanship according to the bmusic website. Brilliant. Many thanks for sharing. I love this type of video.

Nice one! A good instrument to do an explore of would be Coventry Cathedral - an awesome instrument.

I thoroughly enjoyed that Ian, thank you, my Aunt is an organist but only small church organs. I love hearing a concert organ playing, particularly Bach's music.😁

The multitalented HubNut strikes again! Wonderful tour of an amazing instrument. Thank you, Ian and Carly! Playing the organ is perhaps one of the most complex and demanding things a human can do; there is so much going on, with ten fingers and two feet working at once to manipulate up to 500 controls (keys, pedals, stops, pistons …), often in counterpoint to each other. In an earlier life I was organist at a small country church (a wheezy harmonium and later a modestly large electronic organ). I have (briefly - before being busted and removed!) played the Sydney Opera House organ - at time of build the largest fully tracker-action (i.e. all mechanical) organ in the world, and the Sydney Town Hall organ, one of the very few in the world with a 64-foot rank (physical, not electronically simulated). That rank was for years locked off lest the vibrations destroy the mortar that held together the masonry of the building! Imagine playing the 64-footer at full volume and literally bringing the house down! And the highest-pitched ranks were also locked off lest their sound shatter the building's glass. What a machine! A former acquaintance of mine purchased the unwanted theatre organ (a Christie) from one of Sydney's old cinemas and rebuilt it in his house - which needed a second storey added to accommodate the beast. At full volume, that house surely danced on its foundations. Again, Hubs, many thanks!

Amazing! Thank you for the longest, most detailed and best video looking at a pipe organ that I have ever seen!

That was truly awesome, amazing, and very interesting. I can see the next social "Hubnut plays the classics."

Nothing prepares you for the acoustics of a hall like this.

Wow that was incredible, must visit there someday. Can’t even comprehend how you would design such a thing, never mind play it.

Absolutely fantastic Ian. Thanks again for taking us all to see something many of us will never get the chance to see.

Ian all I can say is wow. I love the sound of the organ & that organ is just brilliant. Thank you IAn this has made my day.

Best vlog ever! JUST GREAT.❤

Loveky video, interesting background story. Well done! 👍🏼😄

Great video! Your can play quite good too, what an instrument 👍

As a Church organist myself, I’m somewhat envious you got to play this.

Utterly superb video! And you are a bit of a musical dark horse!

Fantastic Ian, what a sound, amazing instrument, wonderful building as well, so enjoyed watching that

Awesome! What a machine. Half an hour flying away like nothing. I was listening to your short concert twice! That's cool music, Ian! While you're playing I could read that this concert organ was made by Johannes Klais from Bonn/Germany. On their website you'll find this organ you can all the technical facts in English. Thank you for this video and thank you Carly for filming. See you pretty soon --- Martin

That was really great the whole auditorium completes the experience.

That was a great video. I can listen to this music all day long. It gives me goosebumps and tears in my eyes. What a fascinating piece of engineering. ❤

Your improvisations are always beautiful Ian. I never knew that the space behind an organ is also needed to create the sound.

Fantastic! Thank you for sharing . The sound there must have been amazing

The remote console versus the sound is a nice physics demonstration, the speed of electricity versus the speed of sound, and also way to show how the human brain works, or doesn't at times; if there were too much of a lag between the player and the sound, it could throw them off, akin to those so-called "speech jammers" where you aim a directional speaker at someone and send their voice back in a delayed fashion, which causes the brain to just flop and "jam" your speech, quite a weird effect, useful for shutting up politicians... :P

Very jealous, you're a lucky man!

Has anyone else made the comment about playing with an enormous organ?

Music performances in Symphony Hall are amazing. Orchestra, organ and choirs! I'd actually handled one of those rubber blocks from under floor, a relative worked there during construction.

I didn’t know Alabama had such a nice organ. Git-R-Done

Channelling your inner Philip Glass at the end 😁

I love Symphony Hall so much! Thank you for this video.

What a super video! I didn't know anything about the Symphony Hall organ, still less that it has a tracker-action console as well as an electric console. And fascinating to see behind the scenes as well. You mentioned organist Thomas Trotter: I heard him play at a church in Bradford-Upon-Avon a couple of years back, and very good he was too.

Thanks once again for some truly incredible pipe organ action. That's really made my day! As a side note - I couldn't help but think how cool the theme tune to the original Tron movie would sound through this 😊

There's a hidden bit below the Symphony hall where you can see the foundations sitting on rubber blocks (was part of a Hidden Birmingham Photographic exhibition about 20 years ago!). The reason it's on these blocks is due vibrations that potentially might come from the trains on the west coast mainline running underneath the hall!

This was a great watch. Thanks 👍

Thank you .

Brilliant. I loved every second of it.

It sounds like you can play. Did you have piano lessons when you were little? Have you got a keyboard at home to doodle on? Great video Ian, thanks.

I would love to be close to that! It sounds amazing. Wow, it’s got surround sound too. Never let technology near it. An ancestor of all Keyboards like Casio, Yamaha, Roland etc.

Love it Ian!

Fascinating and I could sense the intensity you were feeling as you played it at the end of the video. It was wonderful. Thanks for this experience, will have to get there for a tour.

Absolutely brilliant. Quite awestruck.

I'm enjoying these organ / instrumental videos. Hopefully there will be more of these to come. What a great price of equipment.

Ian this is why we love your work ❤

Beautiful instrument. I wish I could just play like you. Well done.

Oooh excellent - actual notes. Proper.

Amazing.

Ian "HubNut" Wakeman.

that was very awesome! the enthusiasm on display was really awesome as Colin was completely in the zone "oh if i just do this and that *pulls a bunch of stops tweaks a bunch of things* TaDa!" it always put a grin on my face to see someone so enthusiastic about their thing so to speak :) also you playing at the end! I'd love for a HubNut music release , between the last Organ you played and this one, I quite liked whatever it was you where playing! :)

Very amazing video, my Dad would have loved to have seen this, we have a Hill and Son grand Organ in Tanunda ( Barossa Valley), South Australia, it's nowhere near as big as this one, it had to be totally restored to its former glory. That was the last thing my Dad and I saw before he died three months later, I'm really glad he got to see it.

this and then afterwards see some videos with Anna Lapwood and you are in Organ heaven! As usual amazing video Ian.

great organ dry room

Watch Anna Lapwood she plays organ at the royal Albert hall in London

Excellent. I'm impressed how well the microphone coped with all that!

Very interesting video indeed, thank you Ian, especially the perspective that you get of the sound from the remote manuals in the centre stalls area. I wore my Because French tangerine hoodie to an orchestra-only rehearsal of the Saint-Saëns Organ symphony yesterday😁- now the finale of that is amazing, even without the solo part, with time-signatures in places that are... Because French!!

This was lovely. So strange to hear an American accent on your channel! Fellow Bostonian here

Go on……”pull out all the stops”

Very enjoyable Ian. Sounds better than a Ferrari. What happened to your foot pump organ? I have a long memory!

I used to work with the other tour guide - about 25 years ago

Brilliant video; a nice incite into the world of the many pipes. There’s a movie soundtrack for an 80s film: Akira, which brilliant all the way through, has at the end; last couple of tracks I think! Some great pipe-esk music. I say esk as I can’t be sure, it does sound great though.

My Grandfather was a master organ builder and built some of the church organs around the UK he even built one in his bedroom. Sadly irresponsible relatives who cleared his house when he passed destroyed all his records so we have no idea which churches he did or if any still exist.

AY UP MR HUBNUT

Wonderfully bonkers! Given the mechanical nature and complexity of this beast, it's a wonder it works at all, never mind that it works so well! The sub bass from a really huge pipe organ is among the deepest and most visceral I've ever experienced. I'm a very mediocre keyboard player (I'm actually a drummer, stop sniggering at the back!) but I'd love a go on something like this. I don't think you did too badly on an instrument you're not really familiar with Ian. Watching and hearing Colin playing though, he wasn't even thinking, he was just doing!

Haha Hub Nut strange knowing you from the 2cv video's ....my other interest being theatreorgans and other pipe organs. Thomas Trotter played a few Wurlitzers........first time I saw him must be about 40 years or so

This needs a rewatch with headphones! I notice the remote console has a starting handle just above the pedals 😂 That'd take some winding! I though you were launching into the Interstellar soundtrack for a minute there 😁