HAMMOND ORGAN
How The Hammond Organ Works
The following article contains significant information copied from an article in Horn & Whistle Magazine about Hammond Organs and is reprinted here by permission.
The
Hammond Organ was the first commercially practical electronic organ and
hundreds of thousands have been sold during the company’s long history.
For this article let’s look at the traditional Hammond, that is,
the instrument which Laurens Hammond and his engineers developed and which
made a millionaire out of this former clockmaker. Newer technologies have
made modern Hammonds and other electronic organs and keyboard instruments
quite different from their earlier counterparts, but the traditional Hammond
was and still is a very widely known and used instrument. It also has
some remarkable characteristics that make it a great tool for both tuning
other instruments and also learning about their sounds. For those of you
who like interesting machinery, the Hammond also will hold great appeal
as you see how it works in some detail.
The traditional Hammond organ is not really
an organ at all. It is an electromagnetic electro-mechanical keyboard instrument
that uses traditional vacuum tube technology for amplification and loudspeakers
to be heard. It resembles a pipe organ in its basic features and playing approach
and it can be used as a viable substitute for a pipe organ if neither space
nor funding allow installation of a real organ, which is always preferable
to anything that is an imitation.
As you can see by figures one and two, they
look a lot like the consoles of traditional pipe organs with their double
keyboards and bass pedals at floor level. They differ completely from
traditional pipe organs in their method of tone production and also in
their means of creating different tonal effects or sounds. The way that
the Hammond allows a musician to use the instrument to produce a given
tonality is an excellent study in the development of complex tones and
as such it can show us a lot about the sounds you get from many other
musical instruments. Furthermore, a traditional Hammond’s unique
tone generation system can never get out of tune.* You can use the instrument
as a pitch standard if you need stable and accurate reference tones for
tuning anything else musically tunable.
Figure 1, left. A Hammond classic, a model B3 console. Figure 2, right. A model C3. Both instruments are musically and electrically identical. The only difference between the two is the style of the console woodwork. Neither one makes any sound on its own. Both must be connected to suitable amplifier and speaker systems in order to be heard.
Figure one
is a view of a model B3 console. This was the most famous instrument that
Hammond made, and it enjoyed a twenty year production run with very few design
changes. Actually, it is a direct descendent of and closely resembles the
early model A Hammond of 1937, which was the first commercially practical
electronic substitute for a pipe organ. The B3 appeared in 1954; most of its
internal parts being identical to those of the original 1937 Hammond model
A.
The same instrument was also available in a
slightly different console style with solid sides and back rather than the
four legged style you see in figure one. In this console style, it was called
a C3. Figure two.
Hammond’s most significant ideas concerned generating the basic tones
of the instrument and the development of many different tonal effects, both
of which are so singular that they put the Hammond in a class of its own as
a unique, patentable musical instrument.
Here
we shall examine via pictures, diagrams, Flash movies, sound clips, animated
GIFs and even some JavaScript disassemble-it-yourself presentations what a
Hammond is, what it looks like inside, and why it has secured for itself such
an eminent and enduring position in the world of music.
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