The North Suburban Home Organ Society

Eastern Massachusetts Premier Group for Those Who Love the

HAMMOND ORGAN and OTHER
ELECTRONIC KEYBOARDS

Special EDDIE LAYTON Event

Coming Soon! July 26th. Be With Us!

Welcome to our new 2008-2009 Concert Season.

     Our most recent meeting and concert were held on Sunday, June 28th and featured NSHOS pres, Eric Larson (That's me, I just realized!) Now I have to write a review about what I did. That's a really tough assignment, because it is impossible to be objective about one's own playing. The audience response was enthusiastic, you seemed to enjoy what I played and you laughed at my jokes. So therefore I would say the afternoon was a success. My wife, Elizabeth joined me to sing several songs, Crazy, A Fool Such as I, Looking Back, and I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me. Audience response to Elizabeth was very enthusiastic. It's great to hear how these melodies come alive when she sings them in her excellent contralto voice. Both of us just very recently learned three of these num-bers, getting Looking Back from a Jimmy Sturr album, A Fool Such as I from a fake book, and Elizabeth already knew Crazy, so I learned that one from having her sing it to me.
     I also played several Ken Griffin numbers, using the Wurlitzer electrostatic to copy Ken Griffin's Wurli ES arrangements of both the Cuckoo Waltz and Glowworm as played on his Columbia 67 Melody Lane album, and then using the X66 to sound like a Conn 700 so I could play accurate versions of both Side By Side and Louise, two numbers which Ken played on the Conn instrument.
     In the second half of the program, I played among other numbers, Dave Brubeck's Take Five, which is one of my favorites. I even figured out how to incorporate a pseudo drum solo, by setting up a MIDI keyboard to sound like a drum set and then playing different keys with the right hand in a 5/4 rhythm pattern while maintaining the rhythmic piano and bass vamp simulation on the X66 as Brubeck himself did on a real piano in the original recording. Why I like this number so much is something I've often wondered about. In 5 flats with the very unnatural 5/4 rhythm, it is a real challenge. This is not a piece of music where you can relax and just enjoy playing it. It requires constant vigilance. Maybe it is indeed its multiple challenges that make it so interesting for me as a musician.
     After that, I asked Jim Gregory, our VP to join me on the piano so we could do an organ and piano duet. Jim and I have developed a real musical symbiosis when we do organ and piano duets. Jim is, unlike me, very accomplished on the piano as well as the organ. We instinctively seem to use virtually identical harmonies even when improvising, so we can play together without any difficulty. The enthusiastic applause, cheers and whistles that followed each of our duets was a sure indication that you enjoyed what we did. One of the most enjoyable experiences in my life as a musician is to work with someone who shares my interests and ideas in music and with whom I can develop really neat arrangements on the spot.
     After our formal program, Peggy Pratt sat in on the X and played a number of different songs. It is apparent that Peggy has been as I often say, "burning the midnight candle at both ends of the oil," when it comes to practicing, as this was probably the best I have heard from her yet proving once again the wisdom of the old saying, "persistence pays."
     After Peggy, a guest from North Attleboro who was with us for this program sat in; Dave Lambert. We last saw Dave at our 2007 Ken Griffin Celebration. Dave is a great Ken Griffin fan, and although he does his playing on a Hammond T series spinet, he easily adapted to the Wurlitzer ES and the X66 which are of course both console instruments.
     Dave's imitations of Ken Griffin are excellent. He gets the true Griffin sound, correctly does Ken's signature playing of harmony above the melody and also keeps a nice countermelody going in the background. Except for the slightly different over-all sound of the X from a more traditional Hammond, one could easily sit back and imagine Ken himself at the controls. If Ken had lived longer so that he had been around when the X66 instruments were developed, then Dave's playing would have most likely been exactly what we would have heard from Ken. After hearing this, both my wife and I wasted no time in asking Dave to be an active participant at our next year's Ken Griffin program.
     This of course is yet another good example of why you should attend all of our programs, as you will get to hear a tremendous variety of playing styles and arrangements of songs because all of our various artists interpret songs a little differently, and many have particular areas and styles in which they excel.  —ECL

Next concert, July 26.

This program will feature North Shore Area musician NAT SIMPKINS. More about Nat coming soon.

     

Tech Updates


     We have (fortunately) no new tech updates regarding the club instruments this time. The X continues to operate flawlessly and sounds excellent, thanks to Tim Holloran's rebuild of our Leslie power amplifier.
     Unrelated to this, NSHOS president, Eric Larson is currently restoring the 3/9 Kilgen theater pipe organ from the former Embassy Theater in Waltham, MA. This instrument now resides at the Lakeview Con-gregational Church also in Waltham. Eric has also begun work on the 3/43 pipe organ at the First Church in Ipswich, MA. We will have some pictures of this work at a future date. Although we are primarily a Hammond club, we also have a strong interest in real pipe organs, several of our people have serious involvements with the pipe organ industry, and of course it is from the pipe organ that our Hammonds and other electronic instruments evolved.

— ECL

If you are a professional keyboard musician or a skilled amateur, be sure to contact us. We are always looking for new artists to feature for our programs.

We are very pleased to see that we are getting new visitors to our programs and that many of those who visit have joined our group. We're also getting some visitors via this website. We welcome all to our monthly programs. If you would like to join the North Suburban Home Organ Society, or receive more information about this group, just click here. NSHOS.
Fred Cronin at the X66

Left and below: Fred Cronin at the piano and X66 respectively, playing for our May 24th meeting.
Jim Gregory at the X66 and Yamaha keyboard

Left. NSHOS VP Jim Gregory playing the season starting concert on Sunday, Sept. 26th. Jim uses a Yamaha Psr-420 while maintaining his background harmony and bass line on the X66 Hammond.

Wurlitzer 4600 instrument

Left. Closeup of Wurlitzer 4600 series electro-static instrument. We used this at our last Ken Griffin Celebration for imitations of those selec-tions which Ken played on a similar instrument. Its operating technology is entirely different from that of any other electronic organ, but its ap-pearance looks fairly conventional. Although it has a 12-inch coaxial speaker in the console, we bypassed the console speaker and routed the signal through a mixer with two different digital signal processors in the effects loop and then sent the result through the X66 main tone cabinet as this gives a vastly superior result compared with using the console speaker. Learn more about the Wurlitzer Electro-static Organ.

   Our monthly meetings/concerts are normally held on the fourth Sunday of every month in the auditorium of the Woburn, MA Senior Center on 144 School Street in Woburn, MA. Once in a while, we may schedule for the third Sunday if a special event or holiday falls on or close to the fourth Sunday.

Don't Forget!! Special EDDIE LAYTON
EXTRAVAGANZA

Note date

Sunday, July 26th @ 1:30 PM

Don't Miss It!

   To visit us, get on 128 South and take the Washington Street exit, which is the first exit going south after Route 93. Go to the traffic light at the bottom of a slight hill and turn left. Continue about half a mile, look for Ryan Street on the left. Turn left on Ryan street, proceed about 0.2 mi to School Street. Turn Right onto School street and drive about 0.5 Mi. You will see the Senior Center, which was a former school, on the right. There are two wings to the building. As you drive into the parking lot, you will find the auditorium in the right wing of the building. Park anywhere in the parking lot and enter via the double doors. We look forward to meeting you. Share the joy of music, invite a friend!

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How Does a HAMMOND ORGAN Work?

We have recently added a lot of material to our technical pages, all of which is relevant to equipment that we use for our concerts. We have two new articles, one on MIDI and one on tape echo. The MIDI article is somewhat of an overview as MIDI is a complex and evolving subject however we have covered the essentials of MIDI as it applies to what we do at the NSHOS. We also have an article about the Wurlitzer electrostatic organ. After that, we have started an article about digital signal processing, although of necessity it will be a rather brief outline of the salient features of this very complex technology that is increasingly important in many aspects of modern music production. We've also started an article about the X66 Hammond organ. Not only is that the club's performance instrument, but it is quite different in many ways from the more traditional Hammonds.
     There has been and continues to be a great deal of progress made in electronically produced music and we hope that these technical articles that we include here will be helpful to you in gaining an appreciation for this new technology. We have also begun to include a few sound clips in some of these articles. To hear them, just click on any of the play buttons that you see on the relevant web pages. We implement these sound clips by using Flash, which is a very widely used media application on virtually all computers. We also use Flash for some of the technical animations on our tech pages. If you have a very old computer that does not have Flash capability, you can download Flash player by clicking the link below.  When you arrive at the page, you'll find an icon to click to begin installing Flash on your computer. Because of the huge amount of Flash based content on the web, it is absolutely essential that you should have this most useful feature not just for the NSHOS website, but for many, many others as well.          
Download Flash player.                                               

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