The North Suburban Home Organ Society
Eastern Massachusetts Premier Group for Those Who Love the HAMMOND
ORGAN and OTHER |
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Welcome to our new 2008-2009 Concert Season. Our
most recent meeting and concert were held on August 24 and featured
some of our playing members performing. We started off with our treasurer
Ed Surette who played
a number of familiar tunes in his easy listening style. Ed has a Hammond
in his home and judging by his ever evolving style is spending a lot
of time playing and working out arrangements as he just keeps getting
better and better as time goes on.
Tim Holloran
EDDIE LAYTON Extravaganza Just about
everybody who loves the Hammond Organ and its music is familiar with
Eddie Layton. Eddie was for many years a national representative of
the Hammond Organ Company, traveling all over the USA and even occasionally
to foreign countries to demonstrate the Hammond Company's products.
His mastery of the unique Hammond drawbar tonal system was phenomenal.
Under his ministrations, Hammond organs became all kinds of other instruments.
There were not many sounds that we hear in normal life, from a Hawaiian
guitar to bongo drums that Eddie could not credibly duplicate on a traditional
Hammond.
NSHOS Fall Concert Season is of to a Great Start! September Artist to be announced soon, Stay Tuned!
For a while now,
we have had a few inoperative stop tabs on our X and also some missing
notes on the upper manual when using the solo or complex-wave derived
voices. On May 2, I decided to get ambitious and see what I could do
to fix these. I managed to repair the stop tabs, and also via a liberal
dose of contact-cleaning spray I got all of our missing notes back.
More recently, on June 21, I discovered one preset key higher than normal
and also found the percussion section inoperative. Fortunately, I was
able to correct both problems. The X is a great instrument, but it is
also a very complex instrument, and had not really had any major service
for a long time, so I am now endeavoring to check out the instrument
prior to every concert and attend to whatever technical problems it
may have. As a Hammond club, we are very grateful to the late Lenny
Winter for donating this X to the club which allows the NSHOS to offer
a really first class performance instrument to all of our guest artists. 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 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. Below are a few pictures from our most recent and some previous meetings. |
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Right. Over-all view of the three instruments we used for our special Ken Griffin Event in July, 2008. Background, ca. 1956 Wurlitzer 4600 series electro-static organ, center, X66 Ham-mond, foreground, (lower right) MIDI keyboard. |
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Left. Closeup of Wurlitzer electrostatic in-strument. Although its operating technology is entirely different from that of any other electronic organ, its appearance 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 pro-cessors 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 Electrostatic Organ. |
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Right. Setting up! Background; two digital signal processors wired into the effects loop of the mixer (foreground.) One signal processor was set up to imitate the effect of a Leslie speaker using only its treble rotor. The other processor was set up to do a tape echo simulation. Ken Griffin used a Leslie with the Wurlitzer electrostatic but had only the treble rotor in service. Wurlitzer's vibrato is different from that of most other instruments and is more pronounced on the lower frequencies. On the higher frequencies, the use of the Leslie improved the overall effect. For the concert, we removed the big set of keys, the soldering gun, solder, electrical tape, flashlight, wire insulation scraps, drop light and cell phone! |
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Left: JoAnne McMahon using an Ensoniq keyboard as a piano for her performance in the June 22 concert. This instrument provides very authentic piano tones and with its weighted keys and other features feels exactly like a real piano to the performer. |
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Right: Elizabeth Larson sings for our meeting as Eric plays the X66. The Bingo board on the wall is, needless to say, not part of our performance equipment! |
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Right. Jim Gregory, our May artist playing the X66 and one of two keyboards simultaneously. On top of the X66 is a Hammond Auto-Vari auto-matic rhythm unit. Mackie mixer is in foreground on the table. In June, Jim was nominated and subsequently voted in as the new NSHOS vice president |
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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 fifth Sunday if a special event or holiday falls on or close to the fourth Sunday. Don't Forget!! September 28th First Concert of our new Season. 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! Back
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X66 Hammond Organ | Philosophy 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 in progress
about the Wurlitzer electrostatic organ. After
that, we are planning on 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. After that we are planning on 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. ©2008 NSHOS |
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