7 ms·

“Hearing” the Hammond Organ

68 points by mr_golyadkin 8y ago

exabrial 8y ago
Ironic these things go for quite a bit of money now and are sought after by musicians.
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  Well, certainly unexpected, but some things are just good and become a classic. And yes, they do go for thousands of dollars. In the case of the Hammond, it seems to be mostly by accident. They were just trying to create a cheaper version of a pipe organ, in effect. The tone wheels made it possible. The drawbars allow changing the timbre in a lot of ways, which makes the instrument expressive and configurable. You can adjust the timbre while playing a note! Sort of like using a mute on a trumpet, only more combinations. The keys make a satisfying percussive click when played, which is also expressive. A Hammond player told me once this click was not intentional (the designers viewed it as a bug), but it helps give the instrument a nice attack, which helps make the starting of the notes apparent to the listener and allows the instrument to be used rhythmically. The Leslie rotating speaker was an attempt to create some of the acoustic ambiance of pipe organs. (Which is amazing, by the way. The instrument literally surrounds you in some cases. It's like centuries-old surround sound. Not to mention the rich acoustics of a church hall, which is built to encourage reverberation so that the audience could hear an orator in the days before amplification.) But the Leslie speaker's rotation adds not only spatial effects but also doppler. And the speed of rotation can be changed, so you can make the sound tenser or more mellow by varying the speed. So it's great for expression as well. Incidentally, a lot of other instruments achieved greatness by accident. Resonator guitars (Dobro, National Guitar, etc.) were made in an attempt to get more volume, but they ended up having a unique sound. Electric guitars were made for more volume too, but they opened up an entire new world of tones, as well as different playing styles due to lighter strings. The stereotypical distortion effect on electric guitars (that give them their aggressive "bite") came about because guitar amplifiers just didn't have enough power. The vocoder was developed for speech synthesis and telecom, but it found use in music as a way to give a radically different timbre to a human voice. (Or is it to modulate another instrument's sound to follow the volume of a human voice? Maybe those mean the same.)
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    Don't forget the Fender Rhodes electric piano, which doesn't really sound like a piano at all. It has its own mellow sound, which has become iconic and is a cornerstone of several genres.
    - adrianmonk 8y ago
      Oh yeah, also a good example. Coincidentally, I just recently discovered Marcin Grochowina's channel YouTube, where there are several nice Rhodes videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/jazzijazzful/videos?flow=list&view=0&sort=p https://www.youtube.com/user/jazzijazzful/videos?flow=list&v...
filoeleven 8y ago
I was surprised by the article. I thought it would be about at least one of two things: the Hammond B3 tonewheel organ, or the Leslie rotary speaker that it’s been almost invariably paired with for half a century. The B3 itself lets a player adjust the harmonics of the sound on the fly, shifting from a thick meaty sound to any number of thin reedy or subdued sounds with a single half-instinctual shove. The B3 is all over the place, from gospel to rock to radio plays. You’ll know it when you hear it even if you can’t name it. And the Leslie. Oh, the Leslie. I heard it referred to as “a uniquely American design,” with a woofer aimed downward at a curved wooden wedge and a treble horn for the high frequencies, each piece rotating in opposite directions, throwing sound around a room and affecting the volume and frequencies of the organ in pleasing and interesting ways. Lots of people have spent lots of time trying to recreate this sound in software, with varying degrees of success. My favorite example (real or simulated, I don’t know) is in Portishead’s “It’s a Fire”[0], since the organ is the main instrument and they put it through its paces: flipping the Leslie between its fast and slow modes while pulling the drawbars, and the tonal structure is wonderfully complex as well. I think discovering the mechanics of these two things in tandem was part of what sparked my love of synthesizers and how they can be used to create and shift musical moods. The tools are a bit different but the fundamental idea is very similar. [0] https://youtu.be/7Y26KpgZknY https://youtu.be/7Y26KpgZknY
- eric_jankowski 8y ago
  My favorite example of the B3 is Galactic's "Quiet Please"[0]. At about the 5-minute mark, the keyboardist switches from an electric piano to the organ and makes it sing. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOoNFFKwNts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOoNFFKwNts
- bitbang 8y ago
  There's a very nice FOSS software emulator called SetBFree. The gui interface is a little goofy, but for real usage you would connect a midi keyboard controller anyway. https://github.com/pantherb/setBfree https://github.com/pantherb/setBfree The best sounding commercial keyboard to emulate the B3 IMO is the Nord C2D/C2.
- jeffwass 8y ago
dpeck 8y ago
You have to watch Booker T Jones Tiny Office Concert, https://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135840639/booker-t-jones-tiny-desk-concert https://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135840639/booker-t-jones-tiny..., if you want to see what a real master of the Hammond can do.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- innocentoldguy 8y ago
  Keith Emerson made a pretty good name for himself playing and stabbing knives into his Hammond organ as well.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    Specifically he used the knives to hold down keys for sustained tones. At least one of his knives was a Hitlerjugend knife, given to him by Lemmy Kilmister.
    - jeffwass 8y ago
      A common trick with jazz organists back in the day was to slip a matchbook between the top of depressed keys and bottom of underpasses keys as a sustain, usually done on a high octave of the key as a drone.
  - leoc 8y ago
    Steve Winwood (under direction from Hendrix) on "Voodoo Chile": https://open.spotify.com/track/0auKlivXpm76wR63mMJ3pR?si=D0gJOQnKRSOXwJOfPvPNdQ https://open.spotify.com/track/0auKlivXpm76wR63mMJ3pR?si=D0g...
phasetransition 8y ago
As someone who has nearly two decades moonlighting experience as a live sound mixer, stories like this remain a reminder at how bad humans are in general at hearing. These two instruments are both great, but the Hammond is no analog for a pipe organ. Neither in tone nor the way it interacts with room acoustics. It's fascinating that this could even be a plausible discussion. You can improve your hearing markedly with practice. I didn't start with "golden ears" but have improved a great deal even as my ears age. But many of my worst days behind a mixing desk got the most positive response from the general audience.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  Frankly you make it sound like it's better to not know. Unless you're in music production, learning "how bad things sound" doesn't sound like a good thing.
  - phasetransition 8y ago
    Generally I would agree that if you exercise this muscle, it can be hard to turn off. There's still a lot of room for art in the process, though. With experience you get less attached to your particular sonic leitmotifs, and that helps. Even if you would not personally mix it the same way.
- tirrit 8y ago
  What do you mean, humans are bad at hearing? Most humans have great eardrums. Isn't hearing subjective, and dependent on the goal you are "hearing for"? What do you mean with golden ears? Do you mean perfect pitch? The ability to hear what is not intended by the sound source to be there?
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    There's a difference between simply hearing a piece of music and enjoying it, and being able to pick out the individual elements and identifying them. It takes training and experience, and it absolutely isn't mandatory, but I've found that I enjoy music even more after I started understanding its elements.
block_dagger 8y ago
On my way to see Mad Skillet now. Medeski is an incredible B3 player who brings out a lot of character from the instrument.
ggm 8y ago
Love leslies. Wish more bands were using them. Al Kooper "like a rolling stone" Billy Preston. Miles Davis/Cedric Lawson "rated x" and of course, "green onions" Booker T and the MGs...
anta40 8y ago
Jon Lord was a big Hammond fan. Love his sound.
8bitsrule 8y ago
I was amazed when I first heard about the existence of the seldom-heard-of Hammond Novachord. First produced in 1938, it's one of the earliest polyphonic sound synths ... 25 years before the first (mono) Moog appeared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novachord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novachord http://novachord.co.uk/ http://novachord.co.uk/ Of course that was in the days before transistors ... and so it used 163 vacuum tubes (and 1000 capacitors). VCAs, bandpass filters, LFOs and on.... Only 1000 were made before the war shut down production; there are only a few dozen left it seems.
kazinator 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-hl8Xv0MPk&t=2400s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-hl8Xv0MPk&t=2400s
throwaway8879 8y ago
Great read. I love the Hammond sound. Joey DeFrancesco[0] is an amazing organ player, whom I instantly fell in love with while listening to him featured on Pat Martino's "Live at Yoshi's"[2] record. I think it's my favorite live album ever, or at least up there. Martino's playing is on another level. I think Martino is still touring. His 70s jazz-fusiony records were amazing. My favorite are probably his post-break records in the late 90s. Those licks are impossible to play. And forget about improvising that way... [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhFIupVoVKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhFIupVoVKc [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyJJltEhvkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyJJltEhvkc
dano 8y ago
Lest we forget the Queen of the Hammond Organ, Ethel Smith, playing Tico Tico [1] in the film Bathing Beauty (1944). 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXrnuwZreHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXrnuwZreHg
nitrogen 8y ago
I wonder if the sound of the pipe organ can be reproduced from the harmonic plot: https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/hearing-the-hammond-organ/figure-16a/ https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/hearing-the-hammond-organ/figur...
- eric_jankowski 8y ago
  The harmonic content of a sound is a big component of how we hear it, but the articulation over time of the sound also plays a significant role. This is referred to as the ADSR (Attack Decay Sustain Release) envelope. I would also imagine that each harmonic of a sound has its own slightly different ADSR envelope, so that harmonic profile would change over the duration of the sound.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    Not just that, but every note has a different spectrum, and the spectrum evolves in a different way. Instruments with dynamics - not a pipe organ, unless you include the swell pedal or some of the dynamic effects, like tremulant - the spectrum also varies with dynamics. So generally, no, you can't accurately reproduce a sound with a single plot of the harmonics. I'm more curious about how the physicist worked out a spectral plot by hand before sampling and FFTs were invented and oscilloscopes were barely a thing. I'd guess he sketched the waveform from a scope plot, broke it down into points by hand, and performed a manual DFT - which must have taken quite a while.
    - speedplane 8y ago
      > I'm more curious about how the physicist worked out a spectral plot by hand before sampling and FFTs were invented and oscilloscopes were barely a thing. Before there were digital FFTs, there were analog equivalents. A prism basically does an FFT on light. I don't know, but I'd bet there were many analog based frequency analysis tools available before digital frequency analysis.
    - jeffwass 8y ago
      Frequency Analyzers have been around nearly as long as oscilloscopes. Basically they’ll sweep a band pass filter and plot amplitude vs frequency on the screen. Also - you can reproduce a sound by the frequency domain IF you look at the time progression of it. Some Hammond Organs intentionally had a percussion control where the 3nd or 3rd harmonic would decay over time, giving the instrument timbre a bit of a pop.
fuzzfactor 8y ago
You can tell a lot about a culture by their instruments. It helps to really look deeply. When Hewlett & Packard were strongly involved with the design & production of their legendary instruments these were some of the most well-designed, advanced, high-performance, purpose-fulfilling, and amazingly reliable long-lasting electronics in history. When Hammond was strongly involved with his it was even better. I've got a Hammond amplifier built in 1948, sounds like heaven. There's no need to repair or replace any components yet since it's only 2019. Seemed inspired like Edison or DaVinci. And a benevolent capitalist not a greedy one, after starting a growing company based only on an insignificant amount of one's potential IP there can be a lot of confidence when there's plenty more where that came from. Chapter X - The Tickless Clock, Teleview, and the "Classified" Patent http://thehammondorganstory.com/chapterx.asp http://thehammondorganstory.com/chapterx.asp

68 points by mr_golyadkin 8y ago

exabrial 8y ago

Ironic these things go for quite a bit of money now and are sought after by musicians.

adrianmonk 8y ago
Well, certainly unexpected, but some things are just good and become a classic. And yes, they do go for thousands of dollars. In the case of the Hammond, it seems to be mostly by accident. They were just trying to create a cheaper version of a pipe organ, in effect. The tone wheels made it possible. The drawbars allow changing the timbre in a lot of ways, which makes the instrument expressive and configurable. You can adjust the timbre while playing a note! Sort of like using a mute on a trumpet, only more combinations. The keys make a satisfying percussive click when played, which is also expressive. A Hammond player told me once this click was not intentional (the designers viewed it as a bug), but it helps give the instrument a nice attack, which helps make the starting of the notes apparent to the listener and allows the instrument to be used rhythmically. The Leslie rotating speaker was an attempt to create some of the acoustic ambiance of pipe organs. (Which is amazing, by the way. The instrument literally surrounds you in some cases. It's like centuries-old surround sound. Not to mention the rich acoustics of a church hall, which is built to encourage reverberation so that the audience could hear an orator in the days before amplification.) But the Leslie speaker's rotation adds not only spatial effects but also doppler. And the speed of rotation can be changed, so you can make the sound tenser or more mellow by varying the speed. So it's great for expression as well. Incidentally, a lot of other instruments achieved greatness by accident. Resonator guitars (Dobro, National Guitar, etc.) were made in an attempt to get more volume, but they ended up having a unique sound. Electric guitars were made for more volume too, but they opened up an entire new world of tones, as well as different playing styles due to lighter strings. The stereotypical distortion effect on electric guitars (that give them their aggressive "bite") came about because guitar amplifiers just didn't have enough power. The vocoder was developed for speech synthesis and telecom, but it found use in music as a way to give a radically different timbre to a human voice. (Or is it to modulate another instrument's sound to follow the volume of a human voice? Maybe those mean the same.)
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  Don't forget the Fender Rhodes electric piano, which doesn't really sound like a piano at all. It has its own mellow sound, which has become iconic and is a cornerstone of several genres.
  - adrianmonk 8y ago
    Oh yeah, also a good example. Coincidentally, I just recently discovered Marcin Grochowina's channel YouTube, where there are several nice Rhodes videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/jazzijazzful/videos?flow=list&view=0&sort=p https://www.youtube.com/user/jazzijazzful/videos?flow=list&v...

filoeleven 8y ago

I was surprised by the article. I thought it would be about at least one of two things: the Hammond B3 tonewheel organ, or the Leslie rotary speaker that it’s been almost invariably paired with for half a century. The B3 itself lets a player adjust the harmonics of the sound on the fly, shifting from a thick meaty sound to any number of thin reedy or subdued sounds with a single half-instinctual shove. The B3 is all over the place, from gospel to rock to radio plays. You’ll know it when you hear it even if you can’t name it. And the Leslie. Oh, the Leslie. I heard it referred to as “a uniquely American design,” with a woofer aimed downward at a curved wooden wedge and a treble horn for the high frequencies, each piece rotating in opposite directions, throwing sound around a room and affecting the volume and frequencies of the organ in pleasing and interesting ways. Lots of people have spent lots of time trying to recreate this sound in software, with varying degrees of success. My favorite example (real or simulated, I don’t know) is in Portishead’s “It’s a Fire”[0], since the organ is the main instrument and they put it through its paces: flipping the Leslie between its fast and slow modes while pulling the drawbars, and the tonal structure is wonderfully complex as well. I think discovering the mechanics of these two things in tandem was part of what sparked my love of synthesizers and how they can be used to create and shift musical moods. The tools are a bit different but the fundamental idea is very similar. [0] https://youtu.be/7Y26KpgZknY https://youtu.be/7Y26KpgZknY

eric_jankowski 8y ago
My favorite example of the B3 is Galactic's "Quiet Please"[0]. At about the 5-minute mark, the keyboardist switches from an electric piano to the organ and makes it sing. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOoNFFKwNts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOoNFFKwNts
bitbang 8y ago
There's a very nice FOSS software emulator called SetBFree. The gui interface is a little goofy, but for real usage you would connect a midi keyboard controller anyway. https://github.com/pantherb/setBfree https://github.com/pantherb/setBfree The best sounding commercial keyboard to emulate the B3 IMO is the Nord C2D/C2.
jeffwass 8y ago

dpeck 8y ago

You have to watch Booker T Jones Tiny Office Concert, https://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135840639/booker-t-jones-tiny-desk-concert https://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135840639/booker-t-jones-tiny..., if you want to see what a real master of the Hammond can do.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
innocentoldguy 8y ago
Keith Emerson made a pretty good name for himself playing and stabbing knives into his Hammond organ as well.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  Specifically he used the knives to hold down keys for sustained tones. At least one of his knives was a Hitlerjugend knife, given to him by Lemmy Kilmister.
  - jeffwass 8y ago
    A common trick with jazz organists back in the day was to slip a matchbook between the top of depressed keys and bottom of underpasses keys as a sustain, usually done on a high octave of the key as a drone.
- leoc 8y ago
  Steve Winwood (under direction from Hendrix) on "Voodoo Chile": https://open.spotify.com/track/0auKlivXpm76wR63mMJ3pR?si=D0gJOQnKRSOXwJOfPvPNdQ https://open.spotify.com/track/0auKlivXpm76wR63mMJ3pR?si=D0g...

phasetransition 8y ago

As someone who has nearly two decades moonlighting experience as a live sound mixer, stories like this remain a reminder at how bad humans are in general at hearing. These two instruments are both great, but the Hammond is no analog for a pipe organ. Neither in tone nor the way it interacts with room acoustics. It's fascinating that this could even be a plausible discussion. You can improve your hearing markedly with practice. I didn't start with "golden ears" but have improved a great deal even as my ears age. But many of my worst days behind a mixing desk got the most positive response from the general audience.

fenwick67 8y ago
Frankly you make it sound like it's better to not know. Unless you're in music production, learning "how bad things sound" doesn't sound like a good thing.
- phasetransition 8y ago
  Generally I would agree that if you exercise this muscle, it can be hard to turn off. There's still a lot of room for art in the process, though. With experience you get less attached to your particular sonic leitmotifs, and that helps. Even if you would not personally mix it the same way.
tirrit 8y ago
What do you mean, humans are bad at hearing? Most humans have great eardrums. Isn't hearing subjective, and dependent on the goal you are "hearing for"? What do you mean with golden ears? Do you mean perfect pitch? The ability to hear what is not intended by the sound source to be there?
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  There's a difference between simply hearing a piece of music and enjoying it, and being able to pick out the individual elements and identifying them. It takes training and experience, and it absolutely isn't mandatory, but I've found that I enjoy music even more after I started understanding its elements.

block_dagger 8y ago

On my way to see Mad Skillet now. Medeski is an incredible B3 player who brings out a lot of character from the instrument.

ggm 8y ago

Love leslies. Wish more bands were using them. Al Kooper "like a rolling stone" Billy Preston. Miles Davis/Cedric Lawson "rated x" and of course, "green onions" Booker T and the MGs...

anta40 8y ago

Jon Lord was a big Hammond fan. Love his sound.

8bitsrule 8y ago

I was amazed when I first heard about the existence of the seldom-heard-of Hammond Novachord. First produced in 1938, it's one of the earliest polyphonic sound synths ... 25 years before the first (mono) Moog appeared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novachord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novachord http://novachord.co.uk/ http://novachord.co.uk/ Of course that was in the days before transistors ... and so it used 163 vacuum tubes (and 1000 capacitors). VCAs, bandpass filters, LFOs and on.... Only 1000 were made before the war shut down production; there are only a few dozen left it seems.

kazinator 8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-hl8Xv0MPk&t=2400s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-hl8Xv0MPk&t=2400s

throwaway8879 8y ago

Great read. I love the Hammond sound. Joey DeFrancesco[0] is an amazing organ player, whom I instantly fell in love with while listening to him featured on Pat Martino's "Live at Yoshi's"[2] record. I think it's my favorite live album ever, or at least up there. Martino's playing is on another level. I think Martino is still touring. His 70s jazz-fusiony records were amazing. My favorite are probably his post-break records in the late 90s. Those licks are impossible to play. And forget about improvising that way... [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhFIupVoVKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhFIupVoVKc [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyJJltEhvkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyJJltEhvkc

dano 8y ago

Lest we forget the Queen of the Hammond Organ, Ethel Smith, playing Tico Tico [1] in the film Bathing Beauty (1944). 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXrnuwZreHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXrnuwZreHg

nitrogen 8y ago

I wonder if the sound of the pipe organ can be reproduced from the harmonic plot: https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/hearing-the-hammond-organ/figure-16a/ https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/hearing-the-hammond-organ/figur...

eric_jankowski 8y ago
The harmonic content of a sound is a big component of how we hear it, but the articulation over time of the sound also plays a significant role. This is referred to as the ADSR (Attack Decay Sustain Release) envelope. I would also imagine that each harmonic of a sound has its own slightly different ADSR envelope, so that harmonic profile would change over the duration of the sound.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Not just that, but every note has a different spectrum, and the spectrum evolves in a different way. Instruments with dynamics - not a pipe organ, unless you include the swell pedal or some of the dynamic effects, like tremulant - the spectrum also varies with dynamics. So generally, no, you can't accurately reproduce a sound with a single plot of the harmonics. I'm more curious about how the physicist worked out a spectral plot by hand before sampling and FFTs were invented and oscilloscopes were barely a thing. I'd guess he sketched the waveform from a scope plot, broke it down into points by hand, and performed a manual DFT - which must have taken quite a while.
  - speedplane 8y ago
    > I'm more curious about how the physicist worked out a spectral plot by hand before sampling and FFTs were invented and oscilloscopes were barely a thing. Before there were digital FFTs, there were analog equivalents. A prism basically does an FFT on light. I don't know, but I'd bet there were many analog based frequency analysis tools available before digital frequency analysis.
  - jeffwass 8y ago
    Frequency Analyzers have been around nearly as long as oscilloscopes. Basically they’ll sweep a band pass filter and plot amplitude vs frequency on the screen. Also - you can reproduce a sound by the frequency domain IF you look at the time progression of it. Some Hammond Organs intentionally had a percussion control where the 3nd or 3rd harmonic would decay over time, giving the instrument timbre a bit of a pop.

fuzzfactor 8y ago

You can tell a lot about a culture by their instruments. It helps to really look deeply. When Hewlett & Packard were strongly involved with the design & production of their legendary instruments these were some of the most well-designed, advanced, high-performance, purpose-fulfilling, and amazingly reliable long-lasting electronics in history. When Hammond was strongly involved with his it was even better. I've got a Hammond amplifier built in 1948, sounds like heaven. There's no need to repair or replace any components yet since it's only 2019. Seemed inspired like Edison or DaVinci. And a benevolent capitalist not a greedy one, after starting a growing company based only on an insignificant amount of one's potential IP there can be a lot of confidence when there's plenty more where that came from. Chapter X - The Tickless Clock, Teleview, and the "Classified" Patent http://thehammondorganstory.com/chapterx.asp http://thehammondorganstory.com/chapterx.asp