Garland Pipe Organs of Fort Worth - Stacked Pipes #1

My best friend from college, Kevin, has a son, Jordan, who is a professional pipe organ builder.  My younger brother, Mike, is a pipe organ fanatic.  So, when he (my brother) turned 50 I decided to arrange for a tour of the shop and some of the organs that the company built, installed, and maintain in DFW-area churches.  We drove up one weekend back in October and made a day of it, and a good one it was.  Jordan and his family really went out of their way to make it a meaningful experience, and I'd like to thank them publicly - as public as this blog gets, that is - for making our visit one of the highlights of Mike's year.

When one thinks of organs in churches, there is a stately image that comes to mind of a robed organist playing away in an ornate setting with beautiful singing voices in accompaniment.  And that's true if you go to the churches.  Knowing that to be the image, Jordan warned us that the shop where they're built and tested is just that - a shop, full of tools, shavings of all kinds, sawdust and piles of stuff everywhere, and the loud noises of construction.  That's just what we wanted, though...the churches thing would be just gravy.

And that's how it ended up.  Both Mike and I were fascinated with the shop and being able to see the inner workings of how those incredible instruments are designed, engineered and built from scratch.  There was an area where Jordan fine tuned, "voiced", the pipes, another area where the cabinetry was made, a place where the intricate wiring and circuitry was prefabbed, and yet another area of forty feet in height where the instrument was partially assembled and tested.  We could have stayed all day.

But there were other things on the agenda.  Only a few pics snapped in the shop will be included in this series (just this and the next two posts), as I'm careful to not include things that might be proprietary.  Most will be of the beautiful environments in which the finished products are operated, and it was in those places where we spent the most time.