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Where the furniture maker primarily must understand how wood behaves, the organ builder must also understand how air becomes tone. A pipe organ consists of thousands of parts that must work together mechanically and acoustically — and most of those parts are still in wood, shaped with precision. Here are the most important building blocks in the organ's interior.

§The windbox — the organ's lung

The windbox is the box construction that distributes air (wind) from a bellows or an electric fan onward to the feet of the pipes. Inside the windbox are valves for each note which open and close to allow air flow to the pipes that should sound. This is where the air supply that the organ lives from is controlled and distributed correctly to precisely the pipes the organist is asking for.

§The tracker — connection from key to tone

Tracker is system that passes signal from key on keyboard to right valve in windchest. In mechanical organ tracker consists of direct physical chain of rods angles and levers which organist feels resistance from — gives very sensitive playing. In pneumatic and electric organs signal is instead transmitted with air or electricity which makes it possible to place keyboard and windchest further apart

§Registers and arrangement

A register is a whole row of pipes that have the same tone — one for each key on the keyboard. The organist turns a register on or off with a register pull on a mechanical organ or a register switch on an electric or pneumatic organ. The complete list of all an organ's registers is called the disposition — it is in practice the organ's recipe and tells which tone colours the instrument has available.

§The pipes — labial and tongued

Most organ pipes are labial pipes which work like a flute: air is forced through a slot and against a sharp edge the labium where it is set in vibration and creates the tone. Reed pipes (also called reed pipes) work differently — here air makes a vibrating metal reed vibrate giving a sharper often trumpet-like sound. Pipes can be metal or wood and it is especially in the wooden pipes that the organ builder's woodworking craftsmanship really comes into play: labium core and foot must be cut and bored with great precision for the pipe to sound pure.

§Intonation and tuning

When the pipes are built and installed, they must be fine-tuned twice. Intonation is the process where the pipe's sound and volume are adjusted, among other things by adjusting the labium, core, and air supply so all pipes in a register ring evenly together. Voicing is the subsequent fine-tuning of the pitch itself, often using a voicing belt or voicing wheel on the pipe's upper part.

§Restoration of old organs

Programming data

“An organ is furniture that breathes — and the organ builder must be able to both carpenter it and listen to it.”