St James’ Episcopal Church, Los Angeles July 2023

This Skinner Style organ is a tribute to the very best of American organ builders. The console is a near-perfect copy of an original Skinner instrument built in 1929 for St Peter’s Episcopal Church in Morristown New Jersey, even down to the lever pedal coupler reversers, stop head fonts and traffic-light style warning lamps.

The voicing, using an identical stop list, is also based on this Morristown instrument, although we have omitted the 4th manual so that the Solo ‘floats’ across the other 4 divisions.

It had become clear that the St James’ gallery instrument, an elderly Rodgers was approaching an age where it needed replacement. Our Skinner instrument therefore found a new but temporary home at St James until a permanent solution is devised. The instrument utilises the speaker and amplifier resources of the old Rodgers instrument so the job of connecting up was not too demanding save of course for the lifting up of the console to the gallery.

An unknown we faced was linking the Skinner organ to be played from the pipe organ console and also enabling the Skinner console to power up from an on/off piston on the pipe organ. Both these tasks were eventually achieved with the ancient but effective midi link that was already there.