Hello all!
I'm an amateur classical/acoustic musician that has recently become a Linux church musician out of a combination of necessity and opportunity.
Long story short, after being persuaded to surrender (well, take away for my personal use) our ailing vintage Hammond organ my wife and I had begun using at church, I immediately followed up on some previous research I'd done and installed GrandOrgue on my old Lenovo laptop still running Windows 7, inputting from the cheapest USB keyboard MIDI controller they had in stock at Guitar Center and outputting from my onboard soundcard to the church's (rather unreliable) soundboard and powered speakers. This worked, but involved putting up with the limitations on running large organ registrations with 8 GB of RAM, as well as dialing back sound to avoid the massive distortion from pushing pipe organ sound through that particular sound system.
Fast-forwarding a bit, the Lenovo's keyboard finally died, so currently I'm running GrandOrgue on a Dell Latitude 7490 with 32 GB RAM. I got it with no OS for a good price, so installed Debian 12 like on my desktop computer, and have switched the sound system to my personal vintage home amplifier driving equally vintage KLH model 33 speakers because those pieces have proven to be at least reliable and sound good. It's been extremely easy, since I was able to install GO with "apt" from the terminal, loading the samplesets is the same as on Windows, and my keyboard connected automatically with zero issues. I've also switched to using my wife's Focusrite Scarlett Solo for output to the amp, which also connected automatically and allows me to easily input and control the recorded music we typically have playing before and after services (not my choice, but I'm getting used to it!). With a reliable sound system that can handle a broader frequency range, I can finally spend more time practicing and making better musical use of the GrandOrgue VPO.
My current project is finding a free software Hammond organ emulator that I can actually figure out how to get running. Unlike my first virtual pipe organ experiments, this isn't going quite so well. Perhaps there's just been less interest in a software virtual Hammond for the obvious reasons that even a real tonewheel organ isn't nearly so large and expensive as a pipe organ and that there are so many more good (and relatively affordable) options for a hardware virtual Hammond, some made by Hammond-Suzuki themselves! Some of the software emulators I've found don't seem even intended for Linux, and for the ones I've messed with there's ever so much fiddly business with downloaded installer files in formats I don't recognize. And of course, to me DAWs are pretty much black boxes that I seem to understand even less than some literal black boxes! So far I'm getting (rather impressive) sound out from setBfree in conjunction with QjackCtl, but I've yet to get my controller (M-Audio Keystation 49 Mk III) to talk to it successfully. I'll likely be lurking for a while and posting a thread on that topic eventually.
