Organ building

Studiowaves

One thing that makes a difference in tone bar organs is the need to emulate a rotating tone bar. This means you have to fade in the continuous tones when a key is pressed. Therefore the tone generator should be a 1 voice instrument. Although you can have 60 or so oscillators running constantly in phase, it can be done with a single high octave and trigger spikes that can easily be divided down for the lower octaves. The main reason for tone wheel emulation is to synchronize the tones. What this does is maintains consistent volume when you play octaves. If you try to use polyphonic voices the phase relationship is rarely the same and the second harmonic when playing octaves will change it's volume from being in to out of phase. Hope this makes sense.