Crafting a Heavenly Instrument : Manhattan Beach: This is a special day for Trinity Lutheran Church as its $165,000 pipe organ makes its debut.

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. . . . Praise Him with the timbrel and dance: praise Him with stringed instruments and organs.

--Psalms 100 and 150

Lynn Dobson wanted to coax a joyful noise from his latest creation but was running into a few problems.

After 5,000 hours of construction work and nearly two weeks of installation, Opus 56, the 914-pipe organ he was building for Trinity Lutheran Church in Manhattan Beach, still needed some adjustments.

Too much wind blew through the instrument’s chest. All the middle C’s were stubbornly off-key. And one of Opus 56’s tiniest pipes, a flute-like piece called a gedackt, had mysteriously disappeared.

One at a time, Dobson and his craftsmen painstakingly tracked down and resolved each problem. As a test, tuner John Panning played a few chords.

The sound, rich and enthralling, filled the church’s small sanctuary, and a musical page had been turned in the South Bay.

“There’s really nothing like it around here . . . and there’s probably nothing like it in Los Angeles County,” said free-lance organist Barry Anderson, one of several area musicians who have visited the church in the past few days, eagerly anticipating the organ’s completion.

“The South Bay has some very serviceable instruments that are nice for what they do and how they enhance the worship,” Anderson said. “But I would say that there is room for improvement. . . . This organ is unique.”

The $165,000 instrument, which makes its public debut today during the church’s morning services at 8:15 and 10:45, culminates a decade-long dream for the 240-member congregation.

Unimpressed with their 1962 electronic organ, parishioners had talked for some time of buying a new instrument. After their new church building was completed in 1985, the search for the right organ picked up momentum.

One faction argued for a new electronic organ to save the space and money a traditional pipe organ would consume. Others lobbied for a synthesizer to accommodate more modern music programs and attract a younger crowd.

In the end, longevity and quality prevailed, former church organist and current choir director Carol Levin said. Years of fund-raisers and food sales swelled the organ fund’s coffers.

Combined with a $60,000 mortgage on the church building, parishioners had at last amassed enough funds to build their dream.

Levin and the church’s current organist, Karla Devine, traveled to several churches around the country, playing organs created by most of the nation’s master organ builders.

Lynn Dobson’s organs won their ear--and their hearts.

“His name brings people to their knees in the Minneapolis area,” where many of Dobson’s organs have been installed, Levin said. “This is his first instrument west of the Rockies, so we’re helping to put him on the musical map. But we were just so much more captivated by the sound of his instruments than any others that we tried.

“This is an organist’s joy,” she said. “This is nirvana for any organist.”

Dobson designed Trinity Lutheran’s organ, the 56th of his 18-year career, to match the contemporary stone-and-wood interior of the church’s new sanctuary.

Eighteen craftsmen working in Dobson’s Lake City, Iowa, studio put in 5,000 hours to create the tracker-action organ, so called because of its entirely mechanical function. Other than the electric motor that produces its wind, the instrument is similar in design to organs built as early as the 16th Century, experts say.

Hand-carved white oak, poplar, ebony, rosewood, padauk and Carpathian elm burl make up the case, two keyboards, foot pedals and knobs of Opus 56. Pipes of wood, lead and tin alloys and zinc produce its sound, triggered by an interior maze of intricate connections to the keyboards.

Those connections are what make tracker-action organs special, experts say.

“There is a direct linkage between the key and the valve underneath the pipe and this allows you to control touch with a great deal of sensitivity,” said Max Miller, chairman of the organ department at Boston University. “The electronic action doesn’t allow that with as much finesse.”

And organ pipes, Miller said, produce a truer sound.

“Electronics can imitate a pipe organ very well, except that the tone is always coming through a speaker,” he said. “It’s an unnatural diffusion of sound. It comes from one place.”

Fifteen feet high, 12 feet wide and 40 inches deep, Opus 56’s solid oak frame reaches into the church’s rafters, coming within an inch of the ceiling. Some of its largest pipes, stretching more than 10 feet, are made of flamed copper to radiate subtle rainbow hues and reflect the natural patterns of the rock wall behind the church’s altar.

Dobson knew church members wanted to use their new organ for traditional and contemporary programs.

“They realized that . . . we could create a sound flexible enough to do everything they wanted to do,” he said. “We want a really full-bodied sound that will accompany full congregational singing . . . but it shouldn’t blast them out of their pews.”

After a week’s construction work inside the church, Dobson and tuner Panning set about the painstaking work of “voicing” the organ--a complex process that tunes the instrument and alters the organ’s sound to match the room’s acoustics.

“It’s sort of like a marriage counselor, I suppose,” Panning said. “The room is one entity and the organ is another and you have to marry the two.”

As Panning moved about the church, taking decibel readings and listening to the organ’s tone, Dobson played notes and chords on the keyboards, calling out suggestions.

“It really sucks up sound out there, doesn’t it?” Dobson said of the carpeted, padded-seat sanctuary. “This rough brick absorbs sound, the pews absorb it, the wood isn’t varnished so it absorbs it.”

Using a crisp new $20 bill--”the paper seems to have some kind of tooth in it,” Dobson explained--the two men carefully cleaned razor-thin openings before installing a set of trumpet pipes.

As Panning wiggled each new pipe into place, Dobson played the note. Each pipe first rasped, coughed, then suddenly trumpeted out a clean, clear note.

It was a stirring sound that the church’s congregation has waited years to hear.

“Music is a major part of our lives and it’s one way we understand the message of Christ and we pass it along,” Pastor Craig Beeker said. “It is a human tradition to teach through music. . . . It is, in some ways, the method by which we pass the faith.”