There’s such a cool history behind this story, I think I should start with that. A.N. Shaw Organ company resided in Burlington, ON for many years. The business and phone numbers still show up on the web but the last time I tried to contact them, it didn’t appear as though they were in business anymore. This particular organ was made in 1970 and resided in a church in Burlington until congregations changed and the new congregation wanted to get rid of this organ. It was posted for free on Kijiji. Sad that they did not know about the background on this man and his work.
Quick Link for you:
There are a couple of videos on YouTube as well that play recordings from these awesome instruments. If you look at the below pictures, you’ll see how well organized and simple they were designed (OK, that’s relative I realize). Each note in an octave had it’s own oscillator board that you could pull out/plug in for servicing. Even cooler is they were individually tunable, so you could set up your own scaling! Then there were circuits to filter the sounds and voltage doublers/halfers for different octaves on the keyboard. Easily maintained and probably will last for many years to come. Where Shaw’s electronic organs stood out was the splitting of the ranks into multiple speakers as outlined in the link above. This particular organ split into four speakers, and yes, there definitely was more clarity when mixing ranks and playing out. This predates all the new virtual organ configurations that exist on the market today. No patent for this, but Shaw definitely pioneered the split rank speaker systems for electronic church organs.
Since the organ was installed in the church, the speakers didn’t have backs to them, which I had to fabricate along with speaker wire connectors because the original wiring was hardwired inside the organ. The footpedal wiring was also hardwired inside the console under the floor, so the construction guys had cut the wiring… all 75 wires… Insert my groan here, but they really didn’t have much of a choice. I got a D connector with 100 pins on it and began a long painful process of mapping all the wiring and soldering them to the male and female sides of the connectors. This took the better part of two weeks in the evenings on the living room floor because the wiring was short.
Finally I needed to create a wiring box inside the organ for the speaker wire to connect to (not to deface the backside of the organ), and a power cable because the original one was cut. Other than that, I cleaned up and straightened the foot pedal contacts and the rest of the organ and it was good to go. I resold it to an organist who set it up in the livingroom with all four speakers around the organ. Quadra-sound!
