Modern digital electronics produces very realistic organ sound, and generator units can be successfully incorporated into a traditional wind-blown pipe organ to augment its tonal range or rectify various shortcomings.
Moreover digital stops can be voiced and regulated note-by-note so in recent years it has become perfectly practical to produce a hybrid rank, where some notes are produced by pipes and some by electronics, and where it is genuinely difficult to find the pipe-digital junctions.
The Organ Workshop has worked on numerous hybrid pipe-electronic instruments, ranging from simple 2 or 3 stop extensions right up to complete 40-rank three-manual instruments where we have provided a new console and a complete pipe control system.
Some years back we devised an automatic temperature-controlled tuning system to enable the digitally generated sounds to continuously track variations in the pitch of the pipes. Pipe organ's general tuning varies considerably according to the ambient temperature - in an un-heated church this can be as much as a semi-tone between mid-winter & mid-summer. This device effectively eliminates any such problems.
Here’s a brief selection of photos to illustrate this work:
