Hammond Talk

Laurens Hammond was an inventor, and made clocks. He and his clock company ran into some trouble with the bank, and trying to figure out how to salvage this company they thought, "Okay we can build synchronous motors, we have the ability to create gears, we have all this facility here, what else can we make?" And the idea came up to create an instrument.

Because it's a pre-amplified sound and you've got nine wire contacts on the back of the keys that are touching the bus bar, they ground and make a little pop, which Laurens Hammond thought was a horrible flaw.

That's why he hated the Leslie speaker so much. Because the Leslie used a high frequency driver that literally accentuated that pop and wave.

That's also why if you look at the old standard speakers made by Hammond themselves, the last thing you would find in one of those is a high frequency driver. They used really muddled full range speakers trying to minimize that pop at the beginning of the note which of course now is what everybody loves, that key click. So it's an interesting history.

There was a time when Laurens Hammond was still alive and controlling the company, if you sold Hammond Organs, you could not sell the Leslie speaker. Because Laurens Hammond found the Leslie Speaker to be offensive because of the high frequency driver and accentuated the key pop, which he considered to be a flaw. He didn't want his instruments having the pop at the beginning of the note.

So back in the day, a person would go to one store to buy their Hammond Organ, and then go someplace else to buy their Leslie Speaker, and then they would need to have a technician to install a kit so that the speaker could be used.

Hammond built their own speaker systems. The speaker built for the B3 was called the PR-40 and the smaller version of it the PR-20. And these had fixed speakers with no high frequency drivers, they were purely full range speakers. So the high frequency roll-off was maybe 10k or maybe even lower than that, so it could not reproduce the pop or click.

Don Leslie invented the Leslie Speaker. You have a high frequency driver. Some people would call it a tweeter, but it's a high frequency driver. And it is mounted in the cabinet pointed straight up. Above that speaker, is a horn on bearings rotating round and round being driven by a motor. So the sound is being driven projected up from this speaker into this rotating horn which turns and has a bevel on it kind of like a trumpet.

So it's taking the sound, bending it, and then feeding it out through this horn going round and round and round. If you look inside the Leslie Speaker, it looks like it has two horns. One of them is just there for counter balance. So one horn is live and the other is a dummy.

This high frequency sound, everything from about 600Hz up is coming out of this rotating horn. And it has two speeds: Chorale; which is going very slowly which is a pulsating sound, or Tremolo; which kicks it up to a nice RPM that gives you a nice vibrato effect.

Let's continue to ignore the bass for a moment and just talk about the high frequency driver. When that horn is moving, there are several things that are taking place simultaneously.

The doppler effect comes into play because of this rotation and the horn moving towards you. As the horn is moving towards you, the pitch is actually moving up slightly. And as it moves away, the pitch drops, just like a train whistle comes towards you the pitch gets higher and moving away the pitch drops. So there is the doppler effect and there is also a tremolo effect because of the pulsating rotation. And most importantly, high pitched frequencies are highly directional. So you've got this 360º speaker squirting high frequency and mid-range sounds all around in a circle. And as it's doing that, sounds are moving towards you and away from you, but not only that...high frequency sounds bounce off the walls. But the bounce points are in motion too.

So now it's like a billiard table with all these sounds bouncing around in a rotational pattern. And that's how the Leslie Speaker fills the room with sound.

The woofer is pointed straight down into a wash tub sized baffle, that looks literally like a round tub. It's open at the top and it's got a 45º angle plate in there that's open on one side with a counter balance on the other, so that the bass hits this plate and bounces out 90º along the floor. But that's rotating in the opposite direction.

With the bass, you get the doppler effect, but you don't get the reflections and that sort of thing as much because bass is so non-directional. That's how in these modern day speaker systems you can have a 4 channel system, with all the bass coming out of the subwoofer and it's off in the corner but somehow it sounds like it's coming from all around the room. So bass is not directional, but it does have that rudder and in my opinion the bass motor is secondary, well actually it's third, in line with what is coming from up there in that horn. But that is the essence of the Leslie speaker.

Yes, both Hammond and Leslie are owned by Suzuki. They were both acquired sometime in the late 80's. So Hammond literally bought Leslie.

You're right, the Hammond sound is not considered complete by most people's standards without the Leslie.

And the Leslie was not originally for churches, it was a theatre organ type of thing. It was a pastor in L.A. by the name of Eugene Small that was the first I know of to have a Hammond in his small church. Andraé Crouch's dad, Benjamin Crouch, was pastoring a church in Pacoima and was a close second.

The Leslie speaker really came into its own in the late 50's and went from becoming a novelty to a staple. And it's definitely a big part of the sounds of Gospel and of course Jazz.

From 1934 to 1974 the Hammond organ was an electromechanical device, it was not electronic. Prior to Laurens Hammond almost losing his clock company there was no such thing as an electronic keyboard. All keyboard instruments prior to Hammond were acoustic. You had the acoustic piano, the harpsichord, the reed organ, the pipe organ, the accordion... But there was no such thing as an electronic organ or a keyboard that you plug in and play. So you can say that the Hammond is the father of the modern day electronic keyboard, and from that standpoint it's a remarkable innovation.

When you consider that some of these instruments are 50, 60, 70 years old and are still playing, it's pretty amazing. It's only now that they're starting to die out because they are very old. I don't have anything 40 years old that is electronic. You know, we throw away televisions after a decade. Keyboards that you buy typically have a lifespan of 15 years max.

The Hammond organs that you hear today being used in rock and jazz and gospel even don't sound like they did when they were new. They're not playing up to spec, but they are still playing. The late gospel singer and composer Andraé Crouch has won nine Grammys in gospel music and Lord only knows how many awards in all the years. He was the watershed personality in gospel music, and his comment to me when he was trying to produce the album Mighty Wind, was that he was really flustered because the B-3 that they were using just did not sound right. He was looking for the clean sound of the Hammond organ, but what he was getting was a sound you would hear at the beginning of Oye Como Va by Santana with that distorted growl. A sound which is loved in rock and roll but being totally honest if that's the way a brand new organ would have sounded on the showroom floor in 1936 nobody would want it.

So on one hand we have to produce an instrument to make all the sounds people love from a rock and roll standpoint, but at the same time the instrument has to be faithful back to the original sound as if it weren't all out of alignment with failing capacitors and stuff inside getting old and causing these distortions.

It's an interesting problem that Hammond faces. They have to build an instrument that can sound just like a brand new 1967 or 1966 B-3 that can also sound just like a fifty+ year old instrument that has had the dickens beat out of it.

You have prejudices and expectations about what Hammond music is supposed to sound like. It already has the variable of a phenomenal number of drawbar combinations all producing drastically different sounds, and then you add to it variables of aging and leaky capacitors diodes and resistors that are out of specifications and tubes that are marginal.

The old B3 has an electromechanical sound source that has a tone generator that is made up of an AC synchronous motor driving a gear train spinning 91 different little beetles creating 91 different pitches and all of those pitches are pre amplified by the pre amplifier in the organ and the draw bars, through miles of wire, connects all of those 91 pitches to each, by way of the draw bars to the Keys and so each key is capable by way of those tiny draw bars of creating nine different pitches on the one key. The degree to which you pull that bar determines the intensity of that particular pitch with the volume of that particular piece on that key. So you have fundamentals, you have the eight, four, two and sixteen on drawbars that are the same pitch. Middle C on the organ with the 8 foot draw bar pulled out is truly middle C. By the same token, if I play the A above middle C with that eight foot drawbar pulled out, I'm actually getting A440. But if I pull it out to 16, it's an octave lower. If I pull it out to four, I'm getting 880 because I've actually cut it in half.

And then you have the harmonics. Harmonic draw bars have a harmonic of that fundamental. So you have the fundamentals and then you have the various harmonics and they all exist on that one pitch or that one key. So the original Hammond organ did this by way of wires and it did it by way of preamp that fire the electromechanical tone generator.

Today we have substituted the electromechanical tone generator with an electronic digital generator reproducing the ninety one pitches. It's the same as the old tone generator, but the draw bars on a new B-3 do exactly the same thing as the draw bars on a vintage organ or mixing those pre-amplified pitches, the same way as on the original organs. There are nine wire contacts on those keys grounding to the nine bus bars that traverse the entire keyboard just like on the very first Hammond Model A.

And so you get that same key click because we're grounding and completing the signal the same way the signal was completed back in 1934. We're not having to fake the key click because it's the real thing that you're hearing. Because we have a digital sound source but that basic circuit path is the same. But we've got rid of the motor, the oil, the gears and the little wheels, but the basic concept internally is the same. And because it's a digital source we have some added features like the ability to move up and down pitch wise to tune and transpose. In fact the original instrument was not going to be an organ it was going to be the equivalent of a modern day keyboard. His concept was a single manual instrument that would plug into a radio set for amplification. But what they ended up with was a two manual organ. The Hammond Model-A. He had to convince his board of directors to allow him to patent this in his own personal name rather than the name of the company because if he did the name of the company, the whole thing would be owned by the bank.

And so they trusted him. He put it in his name. And it took off. He bailed the company out of debt and the Hammond Clock Company ultimately became the Hammond Organ Company.

The interesting thing about the Hammond is that it has characteristics about it that are so unique to the methodology that was used in the creation of the sound, and are characteristic of the Hammond Organ exclusively.

Because the Hammond organ in its original form is not really an electronic instrument, it is electro mechanical instrument. It uses the AC synchronous motor to spin a series of gears, and tone wheels at different RPMs each field has a scalloped edge and a magnet and a coil and so each field is generating its own sine wave on a particular pitch and then the drawbars with the Hammond organ are used to mix those pitches on one key. So here you have nine draw bars. Well theoretically on a Hammond Organ you can play nine pitches on one key. And so if you play a triad, really theoretically with just playing a simple triad you can be playing 27 notes, 27 pitches.

Which is why the sound of the Hammond Organ is so unique and is very rich and it's full. For the uninitiated it's difficult to jam with a Hammond organ because sometimes it's difficult to tell what the actual tonic is because of the thick sound and all the harmonics that you can put into the mix with the draw bars.

And then of course because it's a pre-amplified sound and you've got nine wire contacts on the back of the keys and they're touching the bus bar a ground and they make a little pop which Laurens Hammond thought was a horrible flaw.