Amazing thing, when I traded my old gear in for my first piano I got almost what I paid for the Leslie. For the Farfisa, I think I got about twenty bucks.
I used to own one of these babies. Tremendous sound, and I was only pushing a Farfisa Fast IV through it. Played a B3 with a Leslie at a dive in Curtis Bay for a brief period with my current OHO bandmates in the mid-seventies. It was a (sonic) blast.
(from wikipedia.com)
The Hammond organ was invented by Laurens Hammond and John M Hanert and first manufactured in 1935. Various models were produced, which originally used tonewheels to generate sound via additive synthesis, where component waveform ratios are mixed by sliding drawbars. Around 2 million Hammond organs have been manufactured, and it has been described as one of the most successful organs ever. The organ is commonly used with, and associated with, the Leslie speaker.
The organ was originally marketed and sold by the Hammond Organ Company to churches as a lower-cost alternative to the wind-driven pipe organ, and as an alternative to the piano. It quickly became popular with professional jazz musicians, who found it to be a cheaper alternative to the big band. Jimmy Smith's use of the Hammond B-3, with its additional harmonic percussion feature, inspired a generation of organ players, and its use became more widespread in the 1960s and 1970s in rhythm and blues, rock and reggae, as well as being an important instrument in progressive rock.
The Hammond Organ Company struggled financially during the 1970s as they abandoned tonewheel organs and switched to manufacturing instruments using integrated circuits. These instruments never caught on with notable musicians and groups as the tonewheels had done before, and the company went out of business in 1985. The Hammond name was purchased by Suzuki Musical Instrument Corporation who proceeded to manufacturer digital simulations of the most popular tonewheel organs. This culminated in the production of the "New B-3" in 2002, which provided an accurate recreation of the original B-3 organ using modern digital technology.
Hammond-Suzuki continues to manufacturer a variety of organs for both the professional player and the church. Other companies, such as Korg, Roland and Clavia have also achieved success in providing emulations of the original tonewheel organs. The sound of a tonewheel Hammond can also be emulated in modern software such as Native Instruments B4.
Our gig at this blue-collar hotspot was quite a gravy job. We played four hours, with three twenty-minute breaks, every Friday and Saturday night, beer was free and we were paid $120 ($30 per man). That may sound laughable now (it does to me), but being a twenty-something still in college in 1977, this was one hell of a deal. And to make matters even better, the owner installed a Hammond B3 organ (with Leslie tone cabinet) in the club, or maybe it belonged to the Thursday musician but it was never clarified and was available for our (read: MY) use. Any keyboardist knows well the value of this perk, particularly in pre-digital-sample-lightweight-inexpensive-keyboard times. And yet in spite of all these wonderful things available to us during this period, we (can you believe it?) received an offer of a higher-paying gig (I believe it was $40 per man) at a club with a more convenient location to us all, and in a neighborhood where the probability of chairs being broken over patrons' heads was only slightly less. The owner of this bar actually hired us to 'discourage' the patronage of an 'undesirable' younger element that had begun frequenting the establishment and the owner thought he had found in our band/music, just the thing to accomplish this. Years after these events, other members of the group enjoy fondly recalling the job for which we were hired to 'drive customers away.' Poetic justice indeed!
We did take the job. Ten more dollars and much less mileage were certainly well worth it. Needless to say, it was back to playing my cheesy, or should I say sub-par instrument of economic necessity. If memory serves however, this arrangement did not last very long and we ended up with a long-running, relatively prestigious gig at the local American Legion hall for comparable pay and the only stringent requirement being to play God Bless America sometime during the last set of the evening. Being truly devoted veterans and family members thereof, everyone always stood respectfully as we played it in these pre-nine-eleven days. But the place seemed like home. It was cleaner than just about ANY other place we played, the staff was friendly and the clientele attentive and appreciative.
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