The volume from the Solo Room and the Main Room is controlled by shutters that permit the sound to travel through a megaphone-like “Tone Chute” to enter the theatre through a richly ornamented plaster grille. From the Relay Room the wires run to the valves that permit high- pressure air to enter each of the hundreds of pipes that are houses in two rooms over the center of the screen. The console, which rises on a lift out of the orchestra pit, is connected by an eight-inch diameter cable of thousands of tiny wires slightly thicker than a human hair, each representing a single sound, bound with cotton twill and then spilt up through a complex set of magnetic and pneumatic relays which occupy their own room above the stage. When paired with the Byrd’s Tibia Plena (“full flute”) rank, another invention of Hope-Jones, the Byrd’s organ is renowned among organists for the mellowness of its effect.
The organ relies on the richness and beauty of its 8’ wooden Tibia Clausa pipes (Latin for “stopped flute”), which is the most important rank in the theatre organ.
#WURLITZER ORGAN MODEL 605 FULL#
The console also is connected to a marimba, a piano, a mandolin, chimes, sleigh bells, xylophone, and a full range of percussion instruments to use in connection with silent movies, including castanets, drums, a surf machine, tamborines, thunder, bird whistle, train whistle, automobile horn, and horses’ hooves, and tom-tom’s.
#WURLITZER ORGAN MODEL 605 MANUAL#
The Byrd’s “Wurlitzer Hope-Jones Unit Orchestra Opus 1948” has four manual or keyboards and 17 ranks of organ pipes. Hope-Jones and the Wurlitzer Company’s organs were based around the idea of a console that was fully detached from the pipes so that the organist could be seen performing at the same time that a sound resembling a full orchestra completely and invisibly filled the auditorium. The Wurlitzer Company merged that year with a previous organ building firm operated by Robert Hope-Jones, considered the inventor of the electrically-controlled theater organ. The Byrd Theatre’s amazing Wurlitzer Theatre Organ is one of about forty surviving instruments in their original installation out of more than two thousand made by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company between 19.