I play the piano by ear, and the village I live has a pipe organ, it is only two-tiered (as in, it has one lower keyboard and one upper keyboard) it also has pedals. I was wondering, why does a pipe organ have two sets of keyboards and what do the pedals do? In addition to this, would it be possible for me to play a piano piece on a pipe organ, such as the one mentioned earlier in this question?
Thank you.
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In a pipe organ, there are thousands of pipes to produce very high quality sound. It is different than a piano and a lot harder because you have to worry about the pedals for your feet. After a while it will just be natural, but some organ pieces require you to use both of your hands and both of your feet at the same time and very fast. It can take a lifetime to master the piano, but to master the organ you must really be dedicated and practice very hard and be good at sight reading music. On the organ, since you can sustain a note forever, you have to worry more about how loud the note is being played, unlike a piano, and more about how loud and soft the pedals are compared to your hands. It takes a very skilled organ player who can play at three or four different volumes for your hands and fingers. The organ also allows you to adjust to the sound of any instrument by the sound waves mechanically going through the pipes. It’s pretty neat. Sometimes in certain songs, you’ll need to adjust the instrument and other things such as volume, dynamics, and the dampening of the soft pedal, for example, which can be really confusing if you don’t know how to play the song correctly. The main difference betwen the organ and the piano is the bass pedals on the organ for your feet. The chords on an organ sound very pretty, and it takes a really skilled organist to played complicated pieces such as Tocatta and Fugue. It’s about 10 times more complicated than the version for piano which has 3 clefs that you have to worry about (the organ has 4 clefs). You have to be a really good organ player to site read really complicated songs. Although the organ sounds really pretty if played correctly, it’s a much harder instrument than the piano and also can get much louder. It definitely would be possible to play a piano piece on a pipe organ because the organ uses much more notes on average in songs than the piano. You probably couldn’t play an organ piece on the piano very well, but a piano piece on the organ should be no problem. The music is the same for both instruments. Hope I helped!
Maxwell
The top keyboard is an octave higher. The pedals give you some tone and volume control and perhaps couple and decouple the two keyboards – just guessing.
Organs work much differently than pianos, obviously, because of how the sound is produced by the instruments. For the organ, air is blown through a pipe, whereas in a piano, a string is struck. Because of this and other factors, a pipe organ doesn’t allow for much inherent dynamic control (pressing a key harder wont make it louder).
One of the things that developed are multiple "manuals", which is what the extra keyboards are called. A two manual organ like the one you describe probably has Great manual (the lower one) and a Swell manual (the upper), the Great having a pure, full sound, and the Swell have shutters that when manipulated allow for varying dynamics (swells, soft, loud, etc.)
The pedals played by the feet are arranged into a keyboard layout, called the pedalboard. You play bass notes with your feet, just as you would play the other manuals with your hands; it’s like playing with three arms! Organists have a lot two manage, with all those stops and manuals. You would be able to play a piano piece on organ, for the most part, but bear in mind it would sound completely different: the sound doesn’t decay, and you would need a little experience to be able to play musically.
Your "two tiered" organ is in fact a two manual organ. (Manual from the French for ‘hand") It has three (3) keyboards. From the top down, the Swell, the Great and the Pedal. In general the Great is the manual you will play most often; it plays the un-enclosed division of pipes. The swell organ is enclosed, and is under expression control with shutters that control the dynamics of the pipes within the swell box. The pedal division controls the larges (and lowest) pipes in the organ. More often than not, manuals can be coupled together, so that one will play the pipes of the other. Couplers will be identified with nomenclature such as Sw to Gt, Gt to Sw, Gt to Ped, etc.
Small organs may have as few as a single rank of pipes per division, larger ones can have dozens.
… Piano technique does not translate well to to organ.