From las8323@rs175174.ks.boeing.com Thu Aug 23 08:03:21 2001
Subject:Re: 4 drawbars

> Why didn't they,
> unless they wanted to get away from the idea that Hammonds "are drawbar
> organs" (probably).

This is doubtless the case. "Playing the drawbars" is a little known art
even amongst d/b hammond owners. By the late 60's and early 70's, the
organ market was already moving to imitative stops and "home orchestras"
were all the rage be the mid-70's.

Many is the time I've seen a sales pitch where ".. and here we add a
(fill in the instrument) ..." and a nasal or cheesy representation
would, sure enough, be added and the customer would oooo and aaaah at
such power and versatility. Clarinet AND Oboe AND English Horn, you
say??

In fairness, as a populus, our ears were not as refined in those days
and much could be passed off to even studio musicians. F'rinstance,
compare your latest emu strings to an arp omni :-) or your new CX-3
to, say, a univox ... uhhh ... i forgot their hammond-alike. Why,
in 1977 I went into a studio where there was a Crumar T-2 and a
Rotophase and the owner and the producer (on this project) were using
phrases like "pure B-3, man..". I still kinda like the Crumar,
for the sheer fun, but i digress....

Reversing the trends of multi-zillion dollar corparations is a
tough task. Though, ironically, it's easier done from the outside
than from in. For the cost of one set of drawbars I can give
you 1000 patch locations. Heck, there's a little over 43million
drawbar settings possible though perhaps 35 million of those are
just "quieter" voicings and maybe 500 are played much. So there
is a real engineering (yuck) argument for patches and presets
instead of draws. Trouble is, if you ever really follow around
a hard core Hammond guy, he usually doesn't even use the 8
presets on a console manual (sometimes 3 or 4),let alone 1000.

My, my,... what to do...

Larry