Adventures at Church

Today I had an organ adventure. I've been the ward organist for ...maybe twelve years now? ...in our last ward, and in this ward too. Some Sundays are fine, and some Sundays are Bad Organ Days. I'm not sure what today was; it was just...an adventure!

This is not the organ I play, but similar to it.
You set the stops by pressing the larger buttons at the top 

of the organ console. It has nice sounds like "flute" and "oboe" 
...and "trumpet," as well as a few you've never heard of.
It also has "longer and shorter pipes." The longer the pipe, 
the deeper the sound. (Really it's all electronic, so there are 
no actual, physical pipes connected to this organ.) 

The pre-sets are the little round buttons. You can 

program them with several stops, so you can just 

press one button and get a whole bunch of sounds. 

We were going to sing America the Beautiful for the opening song, so I picked out stops on the organ that I thought would sound good for that song and started playing the introduction part. About halfway through the intro my knuckle hit one of the pre-set buttons—although I didn't realize that's what had happened at first. All I knew was that suddenly instead of playing the nice, Sacrament-Meeting-appropriate sounds I'd chosen, now I had nearly every stop on the organ going. It was playing almost every brass and woodwind instrument that the organ can replicate, as well as all the big church organ sounds—including all of the long, pew-shaking pipes. (Imagine the Tabernacle organ crossed with the marine band—but no drums, thankfully!)

Well, it sure surprised me! It surprised the music director, who looked at me to see what was going on; all I could do was shrug my shoulders and look confounded. I imagine it surprised the entire congregation.

At least those stops sounded OK for America the Beautiful. It would have been pretty awful if I'd been playing something like Sweet Hour of Prayer, or I Stand All Amazed!