It is official! After much anticipation, the wait is now over and you can get your copy of Tom Hoehn's wonderful new CD, Sounds of Grace. The first 1,000 copies were delivered on December 21, 2006.

Tom has put a lot of hard work and money into this record and we are very proud to be involved in its production, as well as being able to offer it for sale in our General Store on our Featured Merchandise Page.

To learn more about this recording and the man who made it, visit Tom Hoehn's Featured Artist Page here at Walnut Hill.

Christmas would not be complete without Christmas cards, so we made one of our very own for all the fine folks who visit this site. Just click the picture above to download a printable 1280 x 1024 JPG image of our first annual Christmas card. This one is suitable for framing in your office or recording studio. We will be offering a new one each year, so be sure to collect them all.

On the afternoon of December 15th, Tom Hoehn stopped by the Walnut Hill Recording Studio and gave Gabbie, our vintage Conn 640 vacuum tube Theatre Organ a go, playing almost a half hour of great Christmas music.

The session started off with some music other than holiday tunes, but the Christmas tree sitting on the console of the fourty-one year old organ must have infected Tom with the Yuletide spirit, for it wasn't long into the medley that he got going for Santa! I just wish we had a camera available to take pictures of the event.

We fired up the recorders before he took the bench, and the results are posted below for your enjoyment. Gabbie is quite tired and her tubes are getting gassy, so you will hear some crackling going on here and there that we could not remove. Still, Tom made the old gal sound grand indeed, as he used every stop at his disposal to weave some beautiful melodies that sound hauntingly like a real WurliTzer Theatre Pipe Organ.

• Christmas Medley
  Playing time = 27:52, file size = 38.40MB, bit rate = 128KB/sec.

This is a very large WMA file that streams at 128KB/sec., so we do not advise live streaming. Right-click the title and choose Save As instead. Once the file is on your local machine, play it back from there.

Jonas Nordwall, one of the top Theatre Pipe Organ Artists of all time, played a medley of Chrismas songs on the 4/51 Mighty WurliTzer Theatre Pipe Organ installed at the Organ Grinder Pizza Restaraunt in Portland, Oregon before the place closed in 1996.

• Christmas Medley
  Playing time = 14:04, file size = 19.40MB, bit rate = 192KB/sec.

This medley was converted to WMA format. It is a very large file that streams at 192KB/sec., so we do not advise live streaming. Right-click the title and choose Save As instead. Once the file is on your local machine, play it back from there.

To hear more great material from this superlative and legendary artist on one of the finest WurliTzers ever made, visit the official Oregon Triode Society Recording Session website.

'T was the night before Christmas
In heaven's picture house,
Not a talkie feature was showing,
Not even Mickey, the Mouse;
The curtains were hung
From proscenium with care,
In hopes that St. George, the Wright,
Soon would be there;

The angels were nestled
All snug in their plush velvet seats,
While cupids of Chrysoglotts
Danced like sugar plum sweets;
Now, each toe-hole was opened,
And on each Quintadena a cap,
And every percussion was adjusted,
As well as each toy and trap,

When from under the stage
There arose such a clatter,
Angels sprang from their seats
To see what was the matter.
There, on a rising console,
A spotlight did flash,
As St. George threw open the shutters,
And played a cymbal crash.

With flying fingers and feet
So lively and quick,
They knew in a moment
It was a comedy short flick.
More and more thundering,
As on the ranks came,
And they whistled, and shouted,
And called them by name;

"Now, DIAPASON ! now, VIOLA !
Now, FLUTE and TIBIA CLAUSA!
On, POST HORN! on OBOE !
On, TUBA HORN and VOX HUMANA!
To the rooftops of heaven
The sound bounced off each wall!
Play away, play away,
Yes! George, Play -- play them all!"

So up on the silver screen
The shadows they flew,
Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford,
And Charlie Chaplin, too.
Angels laughed at the pratfalls
And the jokes on the screen
As St George used the toy counter
To accent each scene.

With the ringing and tolling
Of each bell and chime.
They knew that St. George
Was having a marvelous time.
They could tell from his playing,
From his head to his foot,
That he was pleased with each honk
And hoot, rip and toot,

The Glockenspiel -- how it twinkled!
The Xylophone how merry!
The Flutes blossomed like roses,
The Trumpet was a cherry!
The Strings resounded as if
Drawn with a throbbing bow,
And the sob of the Tibia
Was as deep as drifted snow;

At the close of the film
The console rose still higher,
And the songs that St. George played
Displayed the Wurlitzer's power;
The thunder of the Diaphone,
The trill of the Fife;
The Sizzle of Strings and the
Kinura's edge, like a knife.

The sweep of the horseshoe
With pistons and tabs in their order
Red, yellow, white and black,
In a console with ormolu border.
In a Theatre washed with splendor,
A heavenly dream of days gone by,
A dream that's worth the keeping,
And there are those who try!

If hope springs eternal,
Ours is of Hope-Jones;
From labials and linguals,
Aero- and ideo- phones,
From tongue tabs and second-touch;
From Electro-pneumatics, tremulants and such
To colorful voices,
And unified choices of tones.

Together with ranks of Others at the keyboard,
The legacy of Jesse, the humor of Gaylord,
The perkiness of Ann,
The grandeur of Lee,
Mr. Leibert, and Mr. Baker,
Delighting listening ears by the acre,
Showed us truly what
Pipe organ music could be

And what a great and glorious
Sound they did forge,
But it is the one and the only,
The great St. George,
Who is the one
Who defined the art,
The one whose playing
A renaissance did start.

I believe in heaven that
Christmas Carols ring today,
As those legends of the organ
Gather to listen and play,
And those who are there play
A heavenly box of mighty whistles,
With tones that shower on the earth
Like the down of snowflakes and thistles.

Ah! But if we could look in
On such a fantastic sight,
Wouldn't our St. George, with the others,
Exclaim in cheerful delight?

"MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL,
AND TO ALL, A GOOD-NIGHT!"

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,966 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Happy New Year!

From all of us here at Walnut Hill, we extend our best wishes for a happy new year to all. 2005 has been a great year for Walnut Hill, with major growth in the site and lots of news in the TPO world.

2006 promises to be even better as the popularity of the King is sure to grow. Look for lots of new stuff to appear here in the days ahead as we launch our WTPO Internet Broadcasting services.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,894 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Laughing Eyes Music
Website Construction Continues

Tom Hoehn's Laughing Eyes Music website is now online. There is still much work to do but we are making steady progress.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,822 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Steve Worthington has added some new music at his internet radio station, Theatre Organ Replay on Live365.com. We quote him from a post at the Theatre Organ Home Page Mailing List:

We have added another 2+ hours of new material today. There are now over 34 hours now streaming 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Steve

Laughing Eyes Music is now online. This is Tom Hoehn's publishing company. This site is still under heavy construnction, but it promises to be the next big thing in the Theatre Pipe Organ community. Stay tuned as we flesh it out...

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,787 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Laughing Eyes Music
Website Construction Continues

Today, we worked on getting Tom Hoehn's Laughing Eyes Music website online. There is lots of work to do but we are well on our way.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,711 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

The 3/24 Mighty Kimball Theatre Pipe Organ installed at Bob Markworth's residence in Omaha, Nebraska is the Featured Organ for January, 2006.

On Devember 4th, 2005, Tom Hoehn gave a concert at the console of the 3/24 Mighty Kimball Theatre Pipe Organ installed at Bob Markworth's residence in Omaha Nebraska.

Visit this new page to learn more about and listen to this fantastic instrument.

Enjoy!

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,681 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Laughing Eyes Music will be going online in the next few days. This is Tom Hoehn's publishing company. When completed, there will be four independant websites dedicated to the four branches of operation in what promises to be the next big thing in the Theatre Pipe Organ community. Stay tuned...

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,587 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

The offices of Walnut Hill will be closed for the Christmas Holiday season and reopen after the New Year. We will still be checking the mail and the groups, but all submissions will go into a holding area for posting after the New Year begins.

I want to thank all the contributors to the site. Kimmy and I look forward to more folks getting on board in 2006 as the CFTOS, in cooperation with the MTOS and the ATOS, hosts the 51st Annual ATOS Convention in Tampa Florida. 2006 promises to be the best year yet for the King of Instruments. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,552 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

On December 22nd, Eugene Hayek sent in three songs he recorded at the console of his Mighty MidiTzer Style 216. These recordings are now avaiable for you to enjoy on Eugene's Featured Artist page.

We spoke with him about the recordings and this is what he had to say. We quote him below:

I’ve been working hard to get my MidiTzer sounding like a real Mighty WurliTzer Theatre Pipe Organ. I hope these recordings will give you an idea of what I’m after.

This is my first MidiTzer recording and just two computers are being used on these three tunes. Nothing but John Tay’s SoundFonts are used, and each recording gets a little closer to what I’m trying to achieve.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,492 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

The creator of the Mighty MidiTzer, Jim Henry, posted this on Yahoo! Music Groups Theatre Organ SoundFonts today and we quote him below:

We are close to finalizing the MidiTzer 3-manual specification. As a Christmas treat, I have posted an analysis of the ranks and stops and a full resolution screenshot in the MidiTzer Forums.

Jim Henry

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,452 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Console up! Let the show begin. Today, we ran some tests on the main data server to see if we could capture video. The tests were successful and so, in the coming year, you will be seeing some video clips showing Tom Hoehn in action from the many shows he has recorded on film (actually, video tape!)

Tom has several dozon digital video tapes spanning the many years he has sat at the King of Instruments wowing audiences all over the nation. We were successfiul in getting the signal on our server from his camera, so we shall be airing lots of video in the days ahead as we launch WTPO Internet Radio and Television. Stay tuned...

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,392 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Sales of Tom Hoehn's new CD entitled Sounds of Grace were fairly brisk during the first day of its release, with nine pre-orders during his concert on the 18th and five more during the night of the 19th, making for a total of thirteen copies sold during the first twenty-four hours it became available.

His costomers are from all over the globe. Roger Dunk, fellow Yahoo! Music Walnut Hill VTPO group member from the Land Down Under, was the first person to order the record from the internet.

To find out what all the buzz is about, click here.

Last night, we solved a major problem we have been wrestling with since August on our main data server. For the longest time, we were unable to play any kind of file that contained a video stream without the machine locking up.

To solve the problem, we swapped out a video card from the MidiTzer computer and put it in the server. After some small glitches and one BSOD, things began to straighten out and now the server works very well.

There is still one more problem on the server to solve, and that is getting the front panel of the SoundBlaster Live! Drive to function. Again we believe card swapping will do the trick. When this task is completed, we will be able to launch WTPO Internet Radio.

When all is well with the main data server, our next task is to rebuild the MidiTzer computer and install MidiTzer Version 0.50 so that we can begin some long overdue MidiTzer recording sessions. Stay tuned...

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,305 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

On Sunday, December 18, 2005 at 2:30 PM, Tom Hoehn gave a free concert at Grace Baptist Church, 8000 Bee Ridge Road, Sarasota, Florida during the monthly meeting of the Manasota Theatre Organ Society, a proud chapter of the ATOS. Admission was free and over 100 people came from all over the United States showed up to hear Tom play.

Tom was in top form at the J. Tyson Forker Memorial 4/32 Mighty WurliTzer Theatre Pipe Organ, and the program consisted of songs of the season, songs not of the season, something old, something not so old, and requests from the audience. As we get the material edited and converted, we shall be posting it on his new Grace Baptist Church Music Downloads page.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,205 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Walnut Hill has been online since April of 2004. In the first year of operation, there were 9,850 visitors. Nine months into 2005, we saw 9,850 more. Today marked our 15,150th visitor for the year, making for a grand total of 25,000 folks who have walked through our front door in the 20 months we have been online.

This year saw the founding of the Walnut Hill Organ Club at the 50th Annual ATOS Convention in Pasadena, California.

This has been a great year for the site, now totaling 149 pages. Many new pictures have been added, along with a ton of great music by Tom Hoehn, the Bone Doctor, Chaz Bender, Eugene Hayek, Frank Vanaman and Gerhard Kletchowitz, just to name a few.

The Mighty MidiTzer has witnessed explosive popularity with over 5,000 users worldwide. Joe Barron has the most popular site on the internet for TPO, VirtualOrgan.com, with over 8,000 visitors per day. John Tay has created a MidiTzer SoundFont that sounds so much like the real thing that it is truly amazing. Tom Hoehn has completed his first recording, Sounds of Grace, which goes on sale early next week.

Yes, folks, the future of the TPO is bright. Next year promises to be even better as more folks find out about and learn to love the King of Instruments!

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,096 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

On December 17th, 2005, Tom Hoehn, the Bone Doctor and Kimmy went to Grace Baptist Church so Tom could do some rehearsing the day before his scheduled concert for the monthly MTOS meeting on December 18th, 2005.

The Walnut Hill Mobile Recording rig was taken along and the session was recorded. We are in the process of posting several tracks from this session on Tom's new Grace Baptist Church Music Downloads page. Not all the tracks are up yet, so stay tuned as we complete the editing and file transfers.

During a break in Tom's reheasal session, the Bone Doctor took the bench of the Mighty 4/32 WurliTzer and did five new tracks, which are now posted on his Sessions page, for a total of 19 songs recorded on this majestic instrument.

Some of the songs have been recorded on other instruments, but the Mighty WurliTzer at Grace really brings out these tunes, and gives you another slant on the many different sounds various organs can make as you compare them to some of the other tracks Doc has done elsewhere.

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays!

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 15,040 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

This year has witnessed phenominal growth of the Walnut Hill website. At 2AM this morning, we had our 15,000th visitor for 2005, making for a total of 24,850 happy campers since the site went online in April of 2004. We are just 150 visitors away from the 25,000 mark!

What started out as a one page site has now grown to 149 pages, with more on the way as new artists and organs are featured.

The Walnut Hill Pruductions team released their first CD of Theatre Pipe Organ music by the illustrious Tom Hoehn entitled Sounds of Grace, which is expected on store shelves around the 23rd of this month.

Downloads of the Mighty MidiTzer have reached an all-time high of over 5,000 folks worldwide who are now playing the Theatre Pipe Organ virtually every day, with an average of 100 more joining the list daily. December saw the first news of the new Mighty MidiTzer 3MSP 3-manual 19-rank virtual Balaban 4 (see the full story in this issue of the Gazette below.)

The Theatre Organ Academy on Yahoo! Music Groups was formed and now has 100 students enrolled for the Winter Quarter. The featured corriculum is the McMains Series being redistributed in very limited quantities by faculty member Cyrus Roton, one of the contributing members of the Walnut Hill Organ Club.

Yes, folks, this has been a great year. I just know next year will be even better as we launch WTPO Internet Broadcasting and continue to add more content to the site for you, our loyal patrons, whome we can never thank enough for making Walnut Hill one of the largest and most visited TPO websites in the world.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,990 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Joe Barron has released some Christmas Music performed on the Mighty MidiTzer Style 216 Virtual Theatre Pipe Organ by J. J. Tadstone III. To hear this great music, click on the CD artwork above. We quote Joe below from a message he posted at Yahoo! Music Groups Theatre Organ SoundFonts today:

Here's hoping you and your loved ones have a very Merry Christmas this season. It has been a very exiting year and there are more great things coming in the New Year.

Joe Barron
www.VirtualOrgan.com

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,935 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

The Bone Doctor has added three more songs to his Mighty Conn 640 page. By special request, these are all Christmas songs. Enjoy!

Eugene Hayek has added two Christmas songs on his Featured Artist page, done on his massive MIDI setup. Enjoy!

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,858 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

The Virtual Balaban 4 3-manual 19-rank Mighty WurliTzer Theatre Pipe Organ is up and running, acording to the latest word from the Mighty MidiTzer development team at VirtualOrgan.com as posted by Lead Software Design Engineer, Jim Henry on Yahoo! Music Groups Theatre Organ SoundFonts. We quote Jim below:

Downloads of the new MidiTzer with FluidSynth have been occuring at the rate of about 100 copies per day. Since I have heard very little feedback, I think this version has achieved the goal of vastly simplifying the task of getting a virtual theatre organ running.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,811 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Above is what the latest Mighty MidiTzer fact sheet looks like. If you click on either of the two images, you can download a printer friendly PDF of this brochure, featuring a two page layout with the Style 216 Mighty WurliTzer Theatre Pipe Organ in a scroll-top console on the front and the specifications for the organ on the back.

The fact sheet is nice to have so you can hand out printed copies at your next chapter or club meeting. It is a great vehicle for extolling the merits of this fine program and enticing your members to get started by downloading and giving the Mighty MidiTzer a go, now made easier than ever with the new installer and control panel included with MidiTzer Version 0.50.

The Mighty MidiTzer version 0.50 is a complete download with everything you need to get started on your way top playing the Mighty WurliTzer Theatre Pipe Organ virtually every day, right from your own computer. To learn more about this great program and download your free copy, visit VirtualOrgan.com today!

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,710 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Tom is a prolific organist, playing every chance he gets. Lately, we have been very fortunate to be able to record some of his performances at the King of Instruments.

These have included sessions on the J. Tyson Forker Memorial 4/32 Mighty WurliTzer installed at Grace Baptist Church in Sarasota, Florida, Pipe Organ Paradise east of Wimama, Florida, the 3/12 Robert Morton at the Polk Theatre in Lakeland, Florida, the Mighty Allen at the Shell Point Retirement Community, Dan Rowland's Mighty MidiTzer in Saint Petersburg, Florida, the 3/18 Mighty WurliTzer at Lake Brantley High School in Orlando, Florida and the 3/24 Mighty Kimball at Bob Markworth's residence in Omaha, Nebraska.

Today, we updated Tom's Music Downloads page to make things easier to find and make room for more content from this gifted artist. There are now eight pages where before there was only one long page.

Click on a picture to go to any of the eight pages in this section, where you can download songs from each one of Tom's performances on many great instruments. As we record more sessions, more pages will be added, so stay tuned...

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,642 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

This was posted on the Theatre Organ SoundFonts group on Yahoo! Music Groups today by Jim Henry, creator of the Mighty MidiTzer.

MidiTzer 0.50 with the built-in FluidSynth soft synthesizer is now available for download at www.VirtualOrgan.com

On Devember 4th, 2005, Tom Hoehn gave a concert at the console of the 3/24 Mighty Kimball Theatre Pipe Organ installed at Bob Markworth's residence in Omaha Nebraska. The show was recorded on a digital video camera by his dearest wife, Katie.

When Tom returned to Florida, he brought the camera to Walnut Hill Productions so we could extract the audio for editing and uploading to the site.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,590 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Gerhard Klechowitz, also known as Gary K. and Kilgen, has added a new song entitled Sleigh Ride to his Walnut Hill Wall Of Fame page. Gary is a member of the Dairyland Theatre Organ Society.

Eugene Hayek has added some new Theatre Pipe Organ music on his Featured Artist page, including some of your favorite Christmas songs.

He has also added a very interesting MIDI rendering of the all-time classic, Here Comes Santa Clause, complete with vocals

Eugene is a member of the ATOS, the Walnut Hill VTPO and Theatre Organ SoundFonts groups on Yahoo!.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,474 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Listen to the Bone Doctor
playing his Mighty Conn 640

The Bone Doctor at the console of his Mighty Conn 640 Vacuum Tube Theatre Organ.

T the Bone Doctor recorded some music in the middle of the night at his Mighty Conn 640 on December 8th, 2005. The following evening, he recorded a few more.

The recordings were made using two Shure PE-48 microphones feeding the Electrovoice/Dynacord mixing desk connected to the line in on the main data server soundcard running SoundForge 6. There was no EQ during the recording. The mics were about 2 feet from the speakers and you can hear the pedals clacking because of wore out felt.

During the post edit, there were Sonic Foundry Noise Reduction and Normalization along with Waves Q10, MaxBass, and TrueVerb applied. Windows Plus! Audio Converter was used to convert the WAV's to WMA's.

There are a total of nineteen tracks so far. To hear them, visit the Bone Doctor's Conn 640 page and scroll down near the bottom of the page.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,324 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Tom Hoehn's CD entitled Sounds of Grace moved one more step closer to competion with the final artwork proofs being brough to the Walnut Hill Recording Studio by Tom and Pap Bill for review and approval. Houston, we have a GO!

To commemorate this event, we have revised the Sounds of Grace page to get it ready for the impending release of this great CD by one of the TPO world's most talanted artists, Tom Hoehn.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,281 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Bob Markworth's 3/24 Kimball Recordings
By Tom Hoehn Coming Soon!

Tom Hoehn at the console of
Bob Markworth's 3/24 Kimball Theatre Pipe Organ

Monday evening of this week, Tom Hoehn and his dearest wife Katie returned from his visit to the home of Bob Markworth in Omaha, Nebraska, where he performed on the 3/24 Kimball Theatre Pipe Organ installed there.

The show was filmed with his digital camera, and when Tom came to see us at the Walnut Hill Recording Studio, the audio was extracted and sent to Walnut Hill's main data server to be edited.

We are still in the process of editing, finding that the signal had lots of noise and it also clipped in the camera due to AGC and thus we are having to do major surgery on the waveform to make it presentable. This is expected to take most of the remainder of the week, but by Friday, the new material should be up on Tom's Featured Artist page, along with several pictures taken during the event.

There were so many pictures taken during Tom 's visit that we have decided to feature this organ in January of 2006. Stay tuned as the story unfolds...

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,217 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

The Mighty WurliTzer 3/18 Balaban 4
Coming Soon To A Desktop Near You!

The Virtual 3/18 Mighty WurliTzer Balaban 4

Major developments are happening in the Virual Theatre Pipe Organ world with news of a new version of the Mighty MidiTzer, being developed by Jim Henry and Crew Glazjev that will model the Mighty WurliTzer Balaban 4, a three manual 18 rank Theatre Pipe Organ.

Below is the pipe rank manifest for the two chambers of the 3/18 Mighty WurliTzer Balaban 4 Theatre Pipe Organ, courtesy of Joe Barron at VirtualOrgan.com.

A complete stop list for this organ can be found here, courtesy of the Theatre Organ Home Page Opus List created by Peter Beames of Adelaide, South Australia.

Although a formal release date has not been set, this promises to be a major advance in the quest to put a large theatre organ on your Windows desktop. There is lots of work to do, and so far, the machine is just now entering the design phase, with preliminary screenshots becoming available at TOSF on Yahoo! Music Groups.

In other news, the Mighty MidiTzer Style 216 we have all grown to love is undergoing another upgrade, to version 0.50, to be released on December 11th of 2005. This new version incorporates the FluidSynth technology which will allow the MidiTzer to run on any type of sound engine without polyphony limits. To learn more, visit the official Mighty MidiTzer website.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,160 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Today was the Lord's day, and so the Walnut Hill Office was closed. We did speak with Tom Hoehn in Omaha, Nebraska and he said there would be lots of pictures to go with the recordings of Bob Markworth's 3/24 Kimball Theatre Pipe Organ upon his return to Florida Monday evening. It looks like next week will be a busy one here at Walnut Hill.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,070 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

The season is upon us to deck the halls and spread good tidings of Father God's love and the birth of His Son, Jesus Christ. And so, today, we set about doing just that. Other than hanging the decorations on the website, not much happened at the Walnut Hill Office during the working day.

In other news....

While roaming about in Clearwater yesterday with my dearest Kimmy, I stumbled across a record in 33 1/3 Vinyl LP format entitled "Al Melgard at the Chicago Stadium Organ" that was copyrighted in 1958. I found the record at a local thrift shop. It is in pristine condition and the jacket looks almost new.

For those who do not know, the Chicago Stadium Organ was the great six manual Grande Barton Theatre Pipe Organ that is now in the home of Phil Maloof in Las Vegas, Nevada. This was the largest Theatre Pipe Organ ever built by any manufacturer.

On the record jacket, the merits of the recording are touted as having a full stereo spread and a frequency response of 16 to 25,000 Hz. I have a turntable that is equipped with a cartridge that can respond to all of these frequencies, and so I must unlimber it and set it to the task of feeding the sound of this record into my data server for transcription to a CD.

If anyone knows whether this record has been released on CD, I would like to know. I shall trascribe it to CD to preserve it. I cannot give out copies or even post the tracks here, but if the album is available, I can link to it in the General Store.

By the way, I aquired the record for the tidy sum of twenty-five cents, and I didn't even have to haggle to get that price.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 14,000 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

Today, Tom Hoehn and his dearest wife Katie took off on a flight to visit Bob Markworth in Omaha, Nebraska, who has a lovely white and gold Kimball 3/24 Theatre Pipe Organ installed in his home.

Upon arriving at Bob's place, Tom showed off the Walnut Hill website to Bob and became our 14,000th visitor. On Sunday, Tom will be performing on the 3/24 Kimball as the camera rolls. When he returns to Florida on Monday evening, we plan to extract the audio from the video tape and present it on Tom's Music Downloads page the following week.

Tom also informed us that the proofs for his upcoming CD entitled Sounds of Grace have been sent to him for approval and that the album art is stunning. Stay tuned as the story unfolds...

Professor Peter Von Coller, fellow Walnut Hill VTPO member, has started up a new internet radio station dedicated to a varied selection of great music.

Peter is a professor of music and has taught at universities in both South Africa and Japan. His musical tastes range from Bach to The Beetles, so his shows are a mixture of all types of musical tastes.

Peter is currently resident organist at the Catholic Cathedral in Pretoria.

We quote the good professor below:

Greetings, Friends.

Regards
Peter

We tuned into the show to find lots of music that would be good source material for transciption to the TPO, but no TPO as of yet. Peter has a Mighty MidiTzer installation in his home from whence the broadcast originates, and maybe in the days ahead, he will treat us to some of the recordings he has made on it.

Greetings from the Bone Doctor.

I want to thank the 13,915 visitors to our site this year. God bless all who come here.

On Novenber 27th, the Orlando Area Theatre Organ Society held its monthly meeting wherein Tom gave a ninety minute concert on the Don Baker Memorial 3/18 Mighty WurliTzer.

In these recordings, there is a popping noise that is the sound of the Swell Shades clacking due to worn out felt. We could not eliminate the noise from the tracks.

To hear this new material, visit Tom Hoehn's Music Downloads page and scroll down to the bottom of the page to find a list of seven songs from the concert.