St. Gabriel's Catholic Church - Charlotte

North Carolina, USA

St. Gabriel Catholic Church is located in the Providence Park area of Charlotte.  In the early 1970s the church installed a 21 rank 2 manual Zimmer pipe organ.  Upon the arriveal of Minister of Music and Organist, Steav Congdon, a search was started to either replace the Zimmer or combine it with a new console and augment the pipe organ with digital samples. The decision was made to make the Zimmer a hybrid of pipe and digital samples.  In addition to Rodgers, the 10 member committee examined two other companies visiting representative installations from two of the three compainies considered. After the vote was taken, the majority of the votes were in favor of the new Rodgers custom four manual organ for interfacing to the Zimmer.  The organ was installed on 20 channels of audio.  The Solo division is located in the center of the room and all other division are installed in the free-standing pipe case.  Additionally, the organ has wooden keyboards, mechanical drawknobs and a MX-200 MIDI module.

Steav uses an IPad to store all of his hymnbooks, organ music and choral music on and to play from using an App called ForScore.  A connector was installed on the organ to interface the IPad to custom pistons and toe pistons that were installed would be able to turn pages forward and backward on the IPad.

Al Murrell, Vice President of R. A. Daffer Church Organs, Inc, Dave Yoder (Project Manager/Voicer) Thomas Murrell and Armon Zinalabedini (Installers) handled the sale and installation of this exciting organ.

Cameron Carpenter played the dedication concert in May 2011 to an overflow audience of 1500 people.