The pipe organ is an awe-inspiring instrument, made famous through works like Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and finding its way into pop culture with Hans Zimmer’s 2014 score for Interstellar. From Bruckner and Saint-Saens, to Muse, Pink Floyd and Zappa, the organ of the Royal Albert Hall has been a British cultural icon for 150 years, housed inside one of the most iconic performance spaces on the planet. Led by film composer James Everingham, decades of experience in engineering, composition and organ mastery have come together to form Enigma Recordings - presenting every nuance of this legendary instrument as a sample library of exquisite detail.

When recording an organ of this size, the room it sits in is almost as much a part of the sound as the instrument itself. Full support from the Royal Albert Hall granted us unprecedented access, allowing us to capture the organ from numerous perspectives around the auditorium - from the very rear of the gallery to mere inches from the pipes themselves, with microphones hung from the roof. We’ve included our favourites as individual positions, and presented these alongside a stereo mix, offering the best of both speed and hands-on control.

We spent many long days at the Hall, and worked closely with Richard Hills - 2010’s Organist of the Year and one of the very few musicians to have mastered both the classical and theatre organ worlds. Richard provided a unique insight into the wide range of colours across the organ’s vast realm of stops. From this, we curated a total of 41 registrations and 18 snapshots across a wide dynamic and timbral range. As a result, you can produce an incredible sound instantly, without any need for pre-existing knowledge of pipe organs.

We placed a Neumann KU100 in the Royal box for a binaural perspective. This offers not only an immersive experience, but provides a clean reference point for starting your own mix - the organ as heard from the most exclusive seat in the Hall.

Known as the ‘Voice of Jupiter’, the organ of the Royal Albert Hall is the second largest in the UK, providing incredible versatility both alongside a full symphony orchestra, and as a fiendishly bold solo instrument. With 9,999 pipes and 147 stops, the organ offers variety on an eye-watering scale - from the soft, delicate timbres of the Swell division, to the thunderous, reverberating power of the Solo Bombard division. We’ve captured everything this organ has to offer on a meticulous level.