TONE GROUPS ON HAMMOND B3 TONEGENERATOR MANUAL

The Hammond Organ story began in a loft (see photo under ) over an Evanston grocery store, for it was there, even before an electric organ was contemplated, that the organization was born that was to become the founder and leading member of an industry. More information can be found at how do you record a Leslie speaker and Miking the Hammond and Leslie.From a 50th Anniversary Hammond Organ Company pamphletīij het 50-jarig bestaan van de Hammond Company verscheen een fraai tijdsdocument over het ontstaan en tot bloei komen van het fenomeen Hammond orgel (de afbeeldingen zijn door de redactie bijgevoegd) There’s a nice article on some of the options for doing this on the Shure website, Miking the Legendary Leslie Tone Cabinet. Recording a Lesie is an art in itself, and there are may ways of approaching it. To the aficionado, the original organs, the best known of which are the B3, C3 and A-100, are still the greatest and there is a thriving market for vintage Hammond organs – and Leslies sixty years after they were first introduced. The Hammond and Leslie brands continue on today and are owned by Hammond Suzuki USA. And it still moves players and listeners alike. The moving sound of this winning combination has something special about it. Hammond dealers were prohibited from selling them in the early days.Įven without advertising, the Leslie was much appreciated and increasingly used by organ players, and by the mid-50s what most people considered to be the Hammond organ sound was actually the sound of a Hammond organ amplified by a Leslie tone cabinet. In essence they are sound modification devices, more like musical instruments than speakers, designed to add to the sound of an instrument by introducing a 3D Doppler effect.Īpparently Don Leslie offered his speaker and cabinet design to Laurens Hammond, but this gentleman didn’t like the sound of a Hammond through a Leslie at all. “Leslies” are speaker cabinets made of solid wood with louvres to let the sound out of the top and bottom of the cabinet and with two rotors that spin and project the sound out into the surrounding space. The Leslie tone cabinet was built by Don Leslie in 1940. The Hammond tone-wheel organ was invented by Laurens Hammond in 1935. The black drawbars introduce dissonant harmonics, which serve to color the tone and give it character. Pulling the brown drawbars makes the tone deeper and fuller. The second brown drawbar is the “sub-octave” of the third harmonic. The first brown Drawbar is the sub-octave of the fundamental Drawbar. The brown drawbars are the two ones to the left, and these produce harmonics below the fundamental tone.

The other white Drawbars are octave intervals of the fundamental tone of increasingly higher pitched notes. The fundamental, ‘core’ tone is created by the first white drawbar. There are three different colors on the drawbars, brown, white and black.

TONE GROUPS ON HAMMOND B3 TONEGENERATOR MANUAL

On a console, you will have 5 groups of drawbars, two for the lower manual and two for the upper manual, each of which consist of 9 drawbars, and one for the bass, which has two drawbars.

When the drawbar is pushed in all the way, no sound from this drawbar is used in the final sound. This terminology is borrowed from pipe organ technology, where this number actually describes the length of the pipe that is used to get a certain tone.Įvery drawbar has 8 settings, which indicate how much of a particular drawbar’s tone is added to the final signal, with 1 being the softest, and 8 being the loudest. As an example, the first (brown) drawbar is marked 16′. They are also sometimes called tonebars, and they are used to shape the sound.Įach drawbar is marked with a number in feet.

The drawbars on a console Hammond or the clonewheels can be a source of much confusion.

Tone groups on hammond b3 tonegenerator