From acdes@southwind.net Tue Jan 22 06:29:57 2002
Subject:Re: Hammond press release?

>

Dan,
Tnanks for the report, got me thinking....

> There
> are real busbars (the 9 metal rods that are underneath the keyboards that
> connect the keys to the drawbars and to the tonewheels), so the keyclick is
> real (mechanical as on the original) and not any kind of digital simulation.
> The sound of each tonewheel is digital (though different from other Hammonds
> to date), so there are no tonewheels. The cost of producing real tonewheels
> would be prohibitive. My understanding is that there are 98 "tonewheels", to
> allow the organ to reproduce the sound of the really old models that did not
> have foldback at the low end (the original B3 had 91 tonewheels)

>
> Of note to this list, the target audience for the new B3 is churches and not
> gigging musicians. The busbar technology, while old and original, is very
> expensive to produce these days.

There is a theory rattlin around in my head. Are the clone-modellers missing a
real bit here??
Consider: With nine busbars, there is a "triggering zone" of somewhere around
.015"-.060" during the key dip. That is, if you press ever so slowly on your
Hammond key, you'll notice the tones coming in at different times in different
orders on different keys. That vertical phenolic piece under each key just
"floats" there that there's plenty of variations. Ok, *some* tones will come in
simultaneous, but never *all* of them.

Ok, so what? Well, I may be wrong but pretty much everyone keys
simultaneously. It is well known that we can sense far beyond what we perceive
(eek! can of worms!) and I wonder if the boys at Hammond are on to something,
here. Unelss, of course, they had boxcars of this stuff just hanging around
(not likely), perhaps a portion of the natural and organic feel of the B is in
that randomized, millisecond, sequenced triggering.

I've been noodling around lately with a different percussion setup on an old
M-3. Wiring up a "multi-hit" percussion circuit -- sort of a "stutter
percussion" only so (adjustably) fast to be nearly imperceptible -- to bring a
little more sparkle and excitement into the sound. I wonder if that's what the
Hammon manual assemblies have been doing all along??

Larry