The funny thing about organs is that they're really a lot of instruments bundled together. A lot of instruments are this way, for instance, pianos, and piano-accordions and harmonicas. Each note has its own sound-producing system. In a piano, there's a set of strings devoted to each note. In an organ, there's a number of pipes devoted to making sounds for each note.
For a flute, for instance, in contrast, all the notes use the same tube to produce their sounds. Same with a clarinet, or a trumpet, or (my instrument) a baritone, or Euphonium, or bassoon. In all of these, there isn'ta way for one note to stop working, leaving the other notes alone. If you've played on an ancient piano, you might have experienced some notes being dumb, but the other notes sounding. Organs have that problem occasionally. But not flutes and clarinets and bassoons.
It's well known that organs have different sounds that can be turned on. For each sound, there has to be a whole set of pipes, one for each key on the keyboard. For 5 octaves, there would be 61 pipes for each sound. For two sounds, 122 pipes. For the pedals, another 61 pipes. This should explain why there's so many pipes in an organ!
If you listen carefully to an organ playing a run (like maybe a scale), you might hear one pipe sounding just a little different! This isn't intentional; just that the pipe—or pipes—for that note sounded different for some reason. After all, it's a whole unique pipe! (In fact, there are organs in which every note has a different sound quality! This is just for fun, and not for serious music.) Also, organ pipes are built in a room, and the acoustics of the room could influence how each pipe sounds, because they're placed in slightly different positions. This sound variation from note to note, if there is one, would be normally considered part of the natural charm of the instrument, and not a flaw.
Archie
