The North Suburban Home Organ SocietyEastern Massachusetts Premier
Group for Those Who Love the
HAMMOND ORGAN and OTHER
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Left.
Eric Larson at the X66 and behind Eric, Jim Gregory at a MIDI keyboard
playing Glenn Miller's famous arrangement of In
the Mood at the June NSHOS concert. |
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Right,
Bill Lambert at the ac-cordion. How does he keep track of all those left-hand
pushbuttons?
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Above,
console of a very rare Wurlitzer 4600 series electrostatic organ from the
1950s. We used that at our Ken Griffin event to do accurate imitations of
those songs which Ken played using that type of instrument. Some of the sounds
of the Wurlitzer electrostatics are so different that they can't be duplicated
by an other instruments. The only thing that gives you the genuine sound of
a Wurlitzer 4600 series ES is another Wurli 4600 series ES instrument.
Learn more about
the Wurlitzer Electro-static Organ. Wurlitzer 4600 instrument FOR SALE This doesn't happen very often. This is a rare opportunity to own a one-of-a-kind classic. |
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Above.
Bill Lambert in the "driver's seat" of the X66 Hammond.
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New Feature!
If you'd like to join the NSHOS, you
can Sign Up Here!
This will take you to a handy form that you can fill out and pay for a membership
via your credit card. If you are an existing NSHOS member, you can pay your
membership renewal dues here as well. If you choose to purchase an NSHOS membership
or renew an existing membership using our on-line forms, you may do so with
the complete assurance that our on-line form has a security certificate attached,
which means that the credit card information that you submit cannot be seen
be anybody else.
Who plays for the NSHOS? We've just begin this page, where
we'll include a picture and a little information about the guys (and gals)
who produce and participate in our monthly concerts. Meet your NSHOS musical
friends here!
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. NSHOS 2010 concert season began 9 27 09
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!
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. ©2010 NSHOS
Regarding
technical matters, we are continuing to improve the club's instrument. The
most recent work involved more contact cleaning. We had several of the tab
voices which did not work on all keys on the upper manual, and also the piano
stop in the percussion division had stopped working entirely. Both of these
problems are now fixed. We also addressed the balance between channels.
The X66 can be a really great sounding instrument, but if, as was the problem in our situation, the tab voices are too loud, or the Leslie speaker dominates, then the end result is not as good as it might be. By reducing the level of the tab voice channel we were able to bring these back in balance with the rest of the instrument. The tab voice channel also includes the pedals which likewise had been overpowering. It is amazing how sometimes a few simple tweaks can really improve the sound of an instrument. Also, two meetings ago, we added a couple of small capacitors to the percussion volume tab circuitry in such a way that the percussion tab, when in the normal position, switches these caps into the circuit. With the caps in the circuit, the overall volume of the percussion relative to the rest of the instrument is reduced, but because of the frequency characteristics of capacitors when handling an audio signal, this also decreases the higher frequencies more than the lower ones. Previously, the percussion on our X66 had been so loud that it made most of the percussion stops all but useless, and the glockenspiel was really piercing. Nobody would ever use it. Now with the percussion and the tab voices back in balance, these very useful but neglected features of the club's X are once again useful, letting our concert artists exploit all of the various tonal resources of this instrument. — 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. |
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