regal

(music) A small, portable organ whose sound is produced by beating reeds without amplifying resonators. Its tone is keen and rich in harmonics. The regal was common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; today it has been revived for the performance of music from those times.

An organ stop of the reed family, furnished with a normal beating reed, but whose resonator is a fraction of its natural length. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these stops took a multitude of forms. Today only one survives that is of universal currency, the so-called Vox Humana.