Blog Page - where I share my NOT AT ALL HUMBLE OPINIONS

The True Sound of the Hammond - A B3 with a 122 Leslie

I recently read on some web page that, "The True sound of a Hammond Organ is the sound of a B3 with a 122 Leslie." Really? Are you sure about that? A Leslie speaker as originally developed was not even a Hammond product! And, a Leslie speaker can significantly alter all audio signals that go through it. Because it does that, how can anybody possibly say that the true sound of a Hammond organ is a B3 with a Leslie 122 speaker? Furthermore, why single out the B3? What about a C3? A BCV? A B2? Or the Leslie 122? What about a Leslie 222? a 251, a 147? There are quite a few different Leslie models that can be made to work with a Hammond organ. And the B3 is only one of several Hammond models that are musically, tonally and electrically either completely identical, or else extremely close. The Hammond C3 is, with the exception of a different woodwork or console style, exactly the same instrument as a B3. The A100 is likewise, with the exception that it has a built-in power amplifier and speaker system. So let's explore this question a little further and see what is really behind this widely held but erroneous opinion; that the true sound of a Hammond organ is a B3 with a Leslie 122 speaker.

When the Hammond organ first appeared, and for perhaps almost a decade after, there was no practical way to add a true, pitch-varying vibrato to this instrument. Hammond's patented, synchronous-motor powered electro-mechanical tone generator ran at an absolutely constant speed, and there was no easy, simple or practical way to vary the frequencies of the tones or signals that it produced. Indeed, one of Hammond's claims to fame was that his instruments would never go out of tune, and there are no tuning adjustments at all in the standard Hammond tone generating system.

The closest that Hammond could come to getting anything at all even remotely related to vibrato was to install a volume varying tremulant in his early instruments. This amounted to a motor-driven volume control that effectively turned the volume of the Hammond up slightly and then turned it back down and did so at 360 times per minute, or 6 times a second. Volume-varying tremolo is OK but it has none of the "richness" or especially the emotional appeal or the big "lush" sound that comes from true pitch-varying vibrato, but it was the best Laurens Hammond could do at the time.

Donald Leslie had purchased an early Hammond organ for his home but he had seen and heard many theater pipe organs, [this was in the 1930s, don't forget] and he wanted, if at all possible, to get the big lush theater pipe organ vibrato that these instruments had because theater organs all incorporated a number of special air-pressure varying devices that slightly cyclically raised and then lowered the pressure of the air, around six times per second, that sounded the pipes; and changing the operating air pressure to an organ pipe, as long is it is done in a carefully controlled manner, will make both the volume, and especially the pitch of the pipes vary with the pressure, and thus produce a really nice vibrato effect in these instruments. But how could Leslie get this to happen with a Hammond organ with its constant and immutable frequency tones?

After much experimentation, he devised a suitable rotary baffle that he placed in front of a conventional loudspeaker, and also a rotary horn that he used with compression-type treble or tweeter drivers, and when he spun these at around 370 RPM, they produced an amazingly good sounding, very lush, pitch-varying vibrato effect because they effectively added motion to the sound sources and this brought the Doppler effect into play. The Doppler effect occurs whenever there is relative motion between a listener and a sound source, and it makes the sound that the listener hears change pitch somewhat, the amount of change depending on how fast the motion is, and whether the sound source and the listener get closer together or farther apart. If the sound source is moving closer to the listener, he hears a slightly increased frequency, and likewise if the sound source is moving away from the listener, he hears a slightly lowered frequency. But the listener only hears these pitch changes while there is motion. Once the motion stops, the listener hears the same pitch that the sound producing device makes.

So after further experimentation and refinement of his design, Leslie developed a speaker system for Hammond organs that created effective motion between the sound source and the listeners, and the result was a very significant improvement over the anemic wavering of the early Hammond volume varying tremolo and the substitution of that with a very good and full-sounding pitch vibrato. Leslie demonstrated his new speakers to a number of musicians who were duly impressed and very pleased with what his Leslie speakers did for the sound of a Hammond organ which now could have a very similar vibrato effect that they were used to hearing from big theater pipe organs.

Needless to say, Leslie tried to get Hammond interested in buying the rights to his speakers but Laurens Hammond wanted no part of it. By that time, Hammond had started a network of Hammond dealers, and he ordered them not to stock Leslie speakers, but many did so anyhow because of the huge tonal improvement that leslie speakers made to the early Hammond organs. But while Hammond was very anti-Leslie speaker, he desperately wanted to get that sound, or something similar so that he could have true pitch varying vibrato in his Hammond organs and not only not infringe on Leslie's patents, but he wanted to be able to make his vibrato affect the electrical audio signals in the Hammond consoles before they ever became sound at the speakers. If he could succeed in doing that, then he would have pitch vibrato, and no matter what kind of speakers he might use, the resulting signal would already have the vibrato added before it even became sound so that this vibrato would work with any normal speaker system and thus he did not need to buy Leslie's patented rotary speaker systems.

So Hammond got one of his close associates, an electrical engineer and musician, John M. Hanert, to develop a vibrato system [known as Scanner Vibrato] that finally did what Laurens Hammond wanted, and produced a true pitch vibrato in the audio signals of his instruments. Like the Leslie effect, Hammond's electrical scanner vibrato was also very full and lush sounding, and it had the added advantage of working with any speaker system at all with no need for special [and patented] rotary baffles and horns. So Hammond thereby could continue to market his own speaker systems, truthfully advertise that Hammond instruments now included real vibrato, and thus I make my rebuttal to the statement that began this article by saying that the true sound of a Hammond organ is not what you hear through a third party speaker system that uses rotary elements after the speakers to add vibrato, but rather that the true sound of the Hammond organ is what you hear when you play it through a normal stationary Hammond speaker system that is intended to reproduce the signals from the console as accurately as possible and does not try to alter them by means of rotating baffles and horns directly in front of the speakers.

A further advantage here is that you can take the electrical audio signal directly from a Hammond console and record it without using any microphones which can in many instances be decidedly advantageous as now you are in effect, when listening to such a recording, plugged directly into the Hammond's amplification system, and what could be a truer sound of a Hammond organ than that?

However, many people (myself included) like the Leslie "after the fact" vibrato effect, which Leslie erroneously referred to as Leslie Tremolo, so when the Hammond Company did finally equip its instruments with true vibrato capability, this did not adversely affect Leslie's speaker business, and it was now possible to have both effects if you wanted them. Also, Leslie's speakers significantly improved the sound of many competing electronic organs that had either no vibrato at all, or a rather inferior vibrato effect.

Therefore, a much more accurate description might be to state that the sound of a Hammond organ with a Leslie speaker is very widely known, but it is most assuredly not the true or genuine sound of a Hammond organ, B3 or otherwise. Eventually after Hammond retired from running his enterprise, the Hammond company began to incorporate various special smaller Leslie systems in many of their self-contained instruments. The Leslie effect does indeed sound very good. It is technically not the true sound of a Hammond organ (or of any other brand either) but it is a nice effect and while I do not see the need of using a Leslie speaker with a Hammond organ that has Hammond's scanner vibrato, I do think it is a nice addition and if I am playing an instrument that does include a Leslie speaker, I will certainly use it. Regarding the use of a Leslie speaker with other makes of electronic organs, I would have to say that it is definitely an improvement over the vibrato that most of these other instruments produce, and this is also true of all of the various Hammond models that do not use the original Hammond scanner vibrato system that John Hanert had developed. The sound of Hanert's vibrato system is in my opinion definitely superior to the vibrato that you can obtain with the vibrato systems of most other well known electronic organs that I have encountered, and the only one, again in my opinion, that does not need to be either supplemented by or replaced by a Leslie speaker.

Attention - folks who play jazz on a Hammond

Howdy! I have a question for some of you. Actually 2 questions. 1. Why do so many of you not use Hammond's pedals and instead play just a "walking bass" with your left hands? 2. Why do so many of you only [or mostly] play in C and avoid the 11 other keys such as C♯, D, D♯, E, F, F♯, G, G♯, A, A♯, B? Sometimes I notice some of you using fantastic displays of right hand dexterity, but why are you not using pedals? Pedals are one of the main features that separate the organ from all other instruments. My suggestion is for you to watch Barbara Dennerlein who does some of the most phenomenal pedal-playing that I have ever seen. OK, I'll admit that the stock pedal tones of a B3 or C3, (or a B2 or C2 or even an older CV or a BCV) aren't always the most inspiring pedal bass effects around, but surely you must have heard of the TrekII string bass, right? Install that on your B3 or other Hammond and you have no excuse for not using pedals.

And, regarding always sticking to the key of C, after a while of listening to anybody playing song after song (or an interminable improvisation) in the same key all the time, this begins to get uninteresting. For that matter I am somewhat puzzled by the idea that so many pops keyboard players never play anything in the following keys: E♮, A♮, B♮, and F♯? This I have never understood, because I find that fingering difficult or tricky parts of some music is a lot easier to do if you are playing in keys that have from 2-5 sharps or flats in their key signatures. It seems that on a keyboard, playing scales in keys such as A♮ E♮ B♮ or F♯, or B♭ E♭ or A♭ is actually physically easier than playing a scale in C, because of the way our hands are arranged. I can actually prove this by trying to play, for example, Zez Confrey's famous Dizzy Fingers, which is written in A♮ in the key of C which becomes much more difficult if you play it at the recommended tempo. The same is true of much of the Clarinet Polka, which is written in B♭ with the bridge in F and the coda in E♭; where it is much less comfortable to play up to speed in C where there are no black keys in the mix that would make the fingering easier and more comfortable. So, aside from adding more listening interest to your musical efforts, it would actually make a lot of the necessary keyboard fingering easier for you also if you would switch occasionally to F, G, B♭ or maybe E♭. Anything other than staying in C for everything will actually improve your music making endeavors in two significant ways: add interest, and make a lot of the fingering easier and more comfortable.

While on the topic of adding interest to playing, what about not using the Leslie on Chorale most of the time and likewise keeping the Hammond vibrato stuck on one of the three "chorus" positions? Actually, keeping the Leslie on Chorale for a long time is not good either. It's supposed to mimic the Celeste effect of a real pipe organ, but the problem with the Leslie chorale is that it is regular and repetitive. The effect is produced by the slow rotation (approximately 40 RPM) of the Leslie rotors, So with long sustained notes you get this repetitive wavering "Wow, Wow, Wow, effect. A true chorus or chorale effect should be slightly different for every different frequency, which, for most typical playing means that there will be no discernible regular repetitious variation, but the presence of a subtle, random motion effect which not only sounds good but adds interest by virtue of its non-patterned nature. I think it would sound better if you pulled the plugs for the slow speed Leslie motors and played with the Leslie stationary if not on the tremolo setting, But as I think about it, for some music the Leslie Chorale setting can be better than not running the Leslie rotors at all, so I guess maybe you should leave the slow speed Leslie motors plugged in after all. Actually, it might involve a little extra work, but maybe installing an easy-access "chorale off" switch as part of the Leslie controls might be the best way to go here. But what do I know?

Actually very little about many things, but it's just that I think jazz is supposed to be very varied and creative and it's largely improvising on existing songs, and part of being creative means doing different things. If you haven't learned how to play Hammond pedals, now's a great time to begin. It's really not all that difficult. And if you're stuck in the key of C all the time, try branching out to the next simplest ones such as F with only one ♭ to be concerned with, or G with only one ♯.

Years ago when I worked in one particular band, our band leader insisted that we must never play more than two songs in the same key in succession during any set, the idea being that even people who have no sense of pitch and know nothing about music other than how to turn on a stereo or stream something off the Internet will still be able to recognize when a number of songs follow each other in the same key. And they like variety and in a club; you don't ever want the patrons to be bored by what you are playing. And likewise, if you aren't going to play pedals, then you would, I think, be much better off by playing either a piano or a keyboard. Certainly moving and setting up a keyboard is infinitely easier than moving a Hammond Organ from one gig location to another, and some keyboards have reasonably good imitations of the more popular Hammond sounds. (Although so far, no Hammond imitation that I have encountered yet has ever been able to get Hammond's scanner vibrato effect right.)

Anyhow, I'd like to hear from any of you who play jazz but do not use the Hammond's bass pedals, and likewise, if you only play in the key of C all the time (or any other key to the exclusion of all others) I'd be curious as to why that is so. Even confining your playing to just the three easy keys, C,F, and G, would be infinitely better, I think, than sticking to C all the time. And the same goes for those who play everything in the key of F♯. And I have seen people who do that. Presumably they are self taught and for whatever reason start learning to play using as many black keys as possible which would put you in F♯ or E♭ minor all the time. Interestingly I have read that no less a musical personality than the great composer Irving Berlin was self-taught and only played in F♯ or E♭ minor and he had a special system of linkages fitted to his piano to accomplish key transposition. Additionally, he at times had other musicians transcribe his songs into other keys before publishing them.

Anyhow, you jazz players out there, start using those Hammond bass pedals! And, once you branch out from playing in C all the time, you'll be amazed at how different keys will influence your improvisations and add a wealth of interest to your playing.

WATCH OUT! The following features of modern keyboards may limit your playing ability if you use them.

1. Automatic arpeggiators; automatic accompaniment and rhythm players. 2. Transposers.

Yes, you read that correctly. These two features of many modern keyboards can limit your musicianship and technical ability if you rely on them. 1. Automatic arpeggiators, accompaniment and rhythm devices. And here I should mention that I am not referring to what we often refer to as drum machines, that will play various drum and cymbal and related instrumental sounds in a rhythm pattern so that when you play, it can sound as though you had a drummer accompanying you. What I refer to here are devices that will automatically play arpeggios, and rhythmic patterns of chords and bass notes for you if you just hold down a few keys.

The reason why these can be detrimental is because you will be able to get the effect of actually producing arpeggios, and harmony and bass in interesting rhythm patterns while you play, but you won't have to do anything other than hold down a few keys in a simple chord, and the keyboard will play these and even derive suitable bass notes from these few chord notes and play all of this in a predefined rhythm pattern. Thus, other than learning how to get the keyboard to do this, you will be denied the opportunity of actually learning how to play such yourself. This feature will absolutely help a beginner to sound much more accomplished than he really may be. However, if you are later on faced with a legitimate instrument such as a piano, or a pipe or Hammond organ where you must actually play arpeggios, accompaniments and rhythms and also bass notes, you will encounter a problem if you have not yet learned these essential musical skills.

A further difficulty is that often these devices will not allow you to put in special rhythm patterns or breaks or specific notes even if you know how to do so, if what you wish to do falls outside of the predetermined patterns that have been initially programmed in. If you do attempt to add your own variations, the onboard computers in such keyboards may get confused and sound some unrelated notes or produce wrong chords making it sound as though you just made a serious mistake. This is why it is so essential to devote the necessary effort and practice time to be able to play these accompaniments yourself, and never depend on the auto-playing features of the keyboard to do this for you. Also, automatic rhythm patterns in these keyboards are usually quite repetitive and actually after a while will detract from listener interest, whereas if you are actually playing these accompaniments and rhythm patterns yourself, you will invariably put in numerous subtle variations which make the music much more interesting to listen to.

2. Transposers allow a person to play in different keys without ever having to learn how to do so in reality. Thus, a person can learn how to play everything in the key of C, for example, which means that regarding fingering patterns and harmony you will only have to learn 8.3% as much as if you choose to play in all 12 keys. Meanwhile, if you want to change key, all you have to do is just make a quick setting change on the transposer, and the music will be automatically changed to any of the eleven other keys, whatever you decide upon. Which is really neat until..... until you are faced with a piano or pipe or Hammond organ and then, all of a sudden you're stuck. I had a person one time play for our former Hammond organ club, and our club instruments at the time were an older C2, and also an X66. Now the X66 had all kinds of interesting tonal effects and percussion features that a traditional Hammond like a C2 did not have, and it was also equipped with an arpeggiator, but a transposer was not one of its features, and the guest artist whom we had for that program was quite accomplished, but unfortunately only for the key of C. So, we listened to an hour and a half program with every single selection in the key of C. No matter that the artist was quite good and played some interesting arrangements, every single one was in C which detracted from the overall interest that his program would otherwise have had because of his interesting and otherwise very advanced arrangements.

No doubt, transposers and automatic accompaniments are included in modern keyboards to make them appeal to beginners, and thus to sell more instruments, because it is very easy to use both of these effects, and both eliminate what would otherwise take a much longer time to learn, so the result is that a beginner, especially one who has some innate musical ability, can very quickly produce playing that sounds reasonably accomplished and do so without needing to invest a lot of extra practice and learning time. The problems arise when a person who is only accomplished on such a keyboard is confronted with a more traditional keyboard instrument where these extra skills are required in order to produce interesting musical results.

Of course, on such a modern keyboard, you don't have to use the auto accompaniments and you can play legitimately, and you do not have to resort to using a transposing device either, so these keyboards can be very musically useful instruments, and the nice thing about many modern keyboards is that the instrumental sounds that they produce are generally sampled from real instruments and are as such very realistic sounding, at least this is true in the better keyboards that are intended for serious musical work. And these keyboards are often not very heavy, so one person can easily move one to a gig without requiring extra people to help with moving, which is not true if you are playing a standard Hammond organ, for example, where you'll need at least two or three extra people especially if stairs are involved.

My only complaint about these keyboards is that they can, by virtue of these auto-play features, limit a person's playing ability by creating a dependence on the autoplay devices at the expense of actually learning how to do what the automatic players do, which is really necessary if you are seriously pursuing playing a keyboard musical instrument. So I guess the takeaway here would be that probably that well known advice that has been a rule for musicians for several hundred years now is still true. No matter what intruments you choose to use, you should always start out learning to play on a legimate piano, which is still the best way to get a good introduction to the essential basics of music making.