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Q: Holland is a long way away. Won't I have trouble getting parts? A: No. The Johannus company is well aware of that aspect of the industry. To make a product and not be ready and able to supply parts for it would be suicide. But the question has always been how to make the supply of parts easily available and economical at the same time, when the company sells organs in 78 countries all over the world. Modern technology has provided the answer. Rather than try to keep a supply of parts in every country they sell in, or to force each dealer to maintain an expensive supply of parts, thus driving up the retail prices, the factory maintains a complete supply of all parts for all organs ever built in their warehouse in Holland and maintains a close relationship with the local UPS and DHL representatives. When a part is needed for an organ, a simple phone call, fax or e-mail to the factory will have the part on the next plane to the door of the client by UPS or DHL Overnight Delivery, arriving as soon as 36 hours later (24 hours plus the 9 hour time difference). Q: But do they guarantee that they will always have parts for all their organs? A: Yes. Each Johannus dealer has in his possession a document signed by the Vice-President of the company guaranteeing that all parts will always be available. Q: OK, but what if the company goes bankrupt and I'm left with an instrument that can't be repaired? I've heard rumors that Johannus is in financial trouble. A: The rumors you've heard have been started by other manufacturers' representatives as a sales tactic, and have absolutely no basis in fact. Johannus has never been healthier. With the introduction in 1996 of the new "real-time sampling" technology, as well as the company's commitment to constant improvement in their products, Johannus sales around the world has risen dramatically, but in the US their sales have skyrocketed! In 1998, US sales rose over 85%, and several representatives for other organ companies relinquished their dealerships to become Johannus dealers. Even the Asian financial crisis couldn't hurt the company's sales figures. Asia has always been a Johannus stronghold, especially Korea, and even during the crisis, sales have been strong. Johannus has even been acquiring smaller organ manufacturers, Makin of England being the most recent. With overall world sales up 100% in the last 4 years and the factory having to double the size of the factory building to keep up, Johannus isn't going bankrupt anytime soon, certainly not within our lifetimes. Q: I live in the desert. Will I be able to find a repairman? A: It is a common trick to suggest to unsuspecting customers that other manufacturers' instruments can't be repaired. If someone says that to you, check to be sure you still have your billfold, because what you are being told is false and patently ridiculous. Basic organ design has become so standard, and electronic design has become so modular, that any organ technician can repair any organ. As long as the schematics are available, and Johannus always supplies the owner of a new organ with a set of schematics, any competent organ technician will be able to affect repairs on your instrument. It is never necessary to get a "Johannus" technician, although that will speed up the process somewhat. If you live in, or move to, a place where there is little civilization, any competent organ tech can repair your organ, so this issue is, in fact, a non-issue. It may be that other organ companies might make it difficult for you to obtain your parts without a "certified factory technician", but this is never the case with Johannus. Q: What kind of warranty does Johannus offer? A: The factory warranties all electronic parts for 10 years. Johannus L.A. extends 10 years labor to that. So if anything goes wrong within 10 years, we'll fix it for you. It's a pretty good gamble. At the 1999 NAMM Show in Los Angeles, Johannus company President Gert van de Weerd was asked about parts availability, and did they really have "one of everything on the shelves at any given time"? He smiled and said that it was actually easy to maintain a complete stock of parts because there really wasn't much call for them. By and large, Johannus organs just don't break down that much. They're that well made. Q: Do all Johannus organs come from the same factory? In most manufacturing circles, parts of the product are assembled in other locations, like Mexico or Taiwan. A: Every organ bearing the name Johannus is assembled at the same factory in Ede, Holland. Most of the components are made by subsidiary companies of Johannus, and the factory builds about 10 organs a day. There is no "cheap labor" used , ever. The people who assemble Johannus organs are expert craftsmen who take a great deal of pride in their profession, and this contributes to a very high employee output ratio. Q: Can I communicate with them directly? Won't the language barrier be a problem? A: In Holland, children are taught Dutch, English, French and German in school from age 9, so virtually everyone in Holland speaks fluent English. In fact, if you are visiting the country, all you have to do is say "hello" or "good morning" or "good afternoon" and they will instantly switch to English for you. The young lady who answers the switchboard at the Johannus factory, speaks several languages, and will switch instantly to English for you if you call. On occasion, there may be a term they're not familiar with or something might "get lost in the translation", so to speak, but communication is fluent, easy and enthusiastic. One of the advantages of Johannus being a small company is that if there is a problem that the local representative can't fix or, for some reason, satisfaction just can't be obtained on a local level, you can call the factory and talk with the company directly. The company executives are very much aware of the importance of good public relations and are committed to keeping their image spotless. Q: Do I have to buy from the local dealer, or can I shop around and buy from a dealer in another part of the country? A: This is a free country and the land of free enterprise. You can buy from whomever you wish. It will have no bearing whatsoever on the product you get – the organs are made the same for customers in Alaska as they are in Florida – and it will not affect the factory 10 year parts warranty. It always makes sense to check out the dealer to get a feel for him or her and decide if this is someone you feel comfortable dealing with for the next 10 years (or whatever). However, some dealers won't sell outside of a certain area, due to the cost and hassle, and it frankly makes more sense to work with someone who is close to home. This way, if there is an emergency, you can get the organ serviced immediately, rather than waiting until the dealer can arrange for a technician to be flown in from wherever it is. Q: Now for the $64 question: how can they sell their instruments so cheaply? A: A good question indeed. One dealer confided a while back that some of his customers were so suspicious of the retail prices of Johannus organs that he got into the habit of jacking up the prices, just to allay their suspicions. How is it possible for Johannus to sell an instrument that is thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars less than a comparably equipped instrument by another manufacturer? How can they build the kind of cabinetry they do for all their organs and make money? There are a couple of reasons. One has to do with attitudes towards profit margins. The Dutch people are, to apply a generalization, a conservative people. This applies to both expenditures in business and to the size of profit margins. In other words, they don't gouge you. They are content to make a fair return from their products, but no more. But the real secret in the Johannus company is their careful attitudes towards expenditures. In other words, they don't waste money. There are no corporate condos in the Bahamas, no stretch limos, no lavish corporate offices, no free organs given away for promotional considerations. They pour their money into their products, not into their creature comforts. How effective are they? In manufacturing circles, it is common to spend about 5 – 10 cents of every dollar brought in on raw materials for the product. The rest goes to the light bill, salaries, pensions, insurance, and so on. Johannus spends about 30 cents of every dollar on raw materials for the organs, which is absolutely unprecedented. The organs cost less to build, the company costs less to run and they pass on the savings to you, the customer. You get a better product for a lot less money. What could be better than that? Q: What about this new trend of being able to download all new samples into your organ? Can I do that with a Johannus? A: No. And it's doubtful that it's likely to become possible anytime soon. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, from a technical standpoint, Johannus samples the entire sound from the pipe, not just the principle tone. The sound of an organ pipe begins with a chiff, when the pipe is pressurizing with air, and then the tone, and then the decay, as the pipe is de-pressurizing. All 3 of these sounds are required for it to sound like an organ pipe and not just a synthesizer or accordion. This constitutes a tremendous amount of digital information, unmanageable by most everyone else. Johannus chooses to include all of this information in their samples, rather than simply splicing on a chiff sample and a decay sample after the fact, because the chiff on a 4' Flute will be radically different from a chiff on a 16' Krummhorn. If those 2 different stops are going to sound authentic, the chiffs have to be authentic and accurately recreated as part of the overall sound event. The only way to do this is to sample the entire stop sound at real time (not high speed, which saves time and money but sacrifices quality). Because different chiffs sound different and affect the stop sound differently, the length of every sample in the organ is different, and the main computer has to be programmed to read the samples in a specific way. If the samples are replaced with other samples of different lengths, the computer won't be able to read them. If Johannus chose to go the easy route and use samples that only included the tone itself, then the samples could be made exactly the same length and the organ could be changed as often as desired. But the very best pipe sound is the result of real time sampling, including the chiff and decay, and Johannus isn't prepared to sacrifice quality for any reason. The second reason is a philosophical one. Serious artists develop love affairs with their instruments. They become intimately acquainted with all of the strengths and weaknesses of their personal instruments and they make music as a team – the composer, the musician and the instrument. The organ is the most complex instrument in the world, which means that it will take longer to get to know an organ than any other instrument, and the organist is an orchestrator, creating colors and shades of sound unequalled by any other musical artist except the orchestral composer. So, just as you're getting to know your instrument, you turn around and change it all? Not only is that self-defeating for the artist, but it relegates the organ's status to that of a toy – a keyboard. If it's more voices you want, almost every organ company, including Johannus, makes a sound module with extra organ samples that can be plugged into virtually any organ or midi keyboard. But Johannus views their organs as serious instruments for the serious artist, and aren't prepared to reduce the credibility of their products simply for the benefit of more gadgetry. Q: I've heard that Johannus makes other organs, and that Johannus is just a name company owned by another company. Is this true? A: First of all, Johannus is the primary company. Because the tax rate in Holland is about 50%, President Gert van de Weerd has created a number of holding companies to help lower the tax load and, subsequently, keep the prices down. Naturally, this can create some confusion when people hear the name Electronium, which is one of the holding companies. But Johannus is the primary company and the name to look for. Secondly, it is true that Johannus builds organs for other organ companies. This is a common practice even here. This can be observed by walking into a supermarket and looking at the house brands, or go to a Radio Shack or Sears store. The house brands are all made by name companies, and a different brand label put on them. Organs bearing the Johannus nameplate are the only ones, however, that have the full technical support and backing of the Johannus company. Not only that, but Johannus dealers buy their organs directly from the factory, whereas the dealers for the other brands have to go through a middleman, which is who provides the technical support and, naturally, drives up the price of the product. Q: Are the baroque voices in a Johannus organ from real baroque organs or are they regular samples that are altered to sound "baroque"? A: The 2 voice system of Johannus is unique in the field and a wonderful tool. Over the years, organ builders have built organs with warmer, lusher sounds, partly in response to the lush music being written by the composers of the Romantic era. As a result, the baroque era instruments that still exist have a much brighter, "in-your-face" tone quality to them, compared to modern instruments. This is not to say that you can't play Bach on a modern instrument, of course, but wouldn't it be fun to be able to play early pieces and hear the kinds of sonorities that the composers intended, and expected to hear? This is the philosophy behind the 2-in-1 organ design of all Johannus organs. Every Johannus organ comes equipped with 2 different voices for every stop. When the organ is switched on, it presets as a Romantic organ, with stop sounds sampled from modern Aeolian Skinner organs around the US. When the Intonation tab is pressed, the organ resets itself as a baroque instrument. The easy way would be to simply run a computer program that alters the original sample, turns down the bass and turns up the treble, but the difference between romantic and baroque stop sounds is also in the character of the sound, not just the tone. So, Johannus went to real 300-year-old European baroque era organs and created a sample library to draw from. When you listen to the baroque stops, you'll hear that there is a difference in the character of the sound, not just in the bass and treble settings. These are authentic baroque pipe samples, and combined with the Werkmeister 3 and Meantone scale tunings that are also standard equipment, the player can be transported back to the first golden era of pipe organ music and hear it the way that Bach intended it to be heard. Q: Do the less expensive models have cheaper technology or materials? A: No. In all cabinetry, from Opus to Monarke, Johannus uses only one grade of wood, one type of adhesive and lacquer, and it's all crafted on the same equipment by the same craftsmen. As for the rest, they only use one keyboard, one drawknob or rockertab design, one grade of wire and all contacts are gold-plated. They use the same samples and the same reproduction technology in all organs, it's just that the more expensive models have more of everything. As the instrument gets more expensive, the player has more resources to draw from – more stops, more memory, more channels, and so on. But there is never a reduction in quality of materials. |
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