From tonysounds@yahoo.com Sun May 09 19:27:10 2004
Subject:RE: XK3 at work
Hey Eric....no, I had no accidents smearing into the black keys, and I must confess that periodically when I haven't played my Hammonds in a while, that foible does happen! But no such accidents with the XK3. (When it does happen to me on a real Hammond, what invariably occurs is that I smear into the black keys, and I end up double triggering the preset so that it defaults to "dead"....nothing more un-rocknroll than that, let me tell you!). As for the case, I still had the case for my Vcombo I ordered from Calzone that I had RnR "fix" for me. They had added one ledge of hard foam across the width of the keyboard and glued it in. I pulled that ledge off, cut 2 pieces off and glued them together to make an endblock, which I then glued in the case. You'd now think this case was custom made for the XK3.
Eric Lawson wrote:Tony, that's a great review. Thanks for giving me gear lust!
Question - is it easy to smear into the black preset keys during normal
playing, causing the preset to come undone and switch to another one? Also,
what kind of case are you using for it? Thanks.
Regards,
Eric Lawson
Moderator
CloneWheel Support Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CloneWheel/
-----Original Message-----
From: tonysounds [mailto:tonysounds@yahoo.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2004 10:46 AM
To: NordElectro@yahoogroups.com
Cc: CloneWheel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [CWSG] XK3 at work
Hey Y'all....
Did a couple shows this weekend with the XK3. Before you ask: No, I have
not yet even tried its leslie sim! I haven't plugged it into my Pro-145 yet
either. I've been having too much fun playing it through a real leslie!
Friday morning I did some modifications to my road rig to ready the XK3s
introduction. I use a Motif 8 and an Invisible Keyboard stand. The Motif
has some extruded knobs that need protecting, and even with my Electro, I
had strategically placed 3 islands of gaffers tape and velcro to the Motif
so that when the Electro hangs over the top of the Motif, it doesn't damage
those knobs. I used soft foam with velcro backs between the Motif and
Electro which is plenty as the Electro is so light and small. I had to
replace those soft foam blocks with hard foam blocks (which I was able to do
as I had just pulled the little "shelf" out of the case for my departed
Vcombo, and after making the endblock for the case to now hold my XK3, I had
enough hard foam left to do the job). After gaff taping and velcro-ing the
bottom of my XK3, I was ready for business. The larger girth and weight of
the XK3 demanded the hard foam blocks, and more velcro to the organ itself
to safely secure it to the
Invisible Stand. No problems!
The band just obtained a "new" vehicle and this was its maiden voyage...we
had some mechanical problems and arrived later than we wanted, but still in
time for the gig; just not enough time for me to spend cranking and tweaking
before show time. Luckily I had been perusing the manual (a very short
read) en route to the gig, and figured out a couple things I needed to know,
such as how to save a program, which is slightly cumbersome at first...or at
least when you're in a hurry on a dark stage. I went to the last bank which
had registrations I normally wouldn't use (very reedy and tibia-like things)
and decided to make that my go-to bank. I set up a couple programs, and
figured just like a real Hammond, I'd tweak endlessly all nite long.
Man, this thing is AWESOME, simply freakin AWESOME!!! First off, if
you're getting one, you must get the Expression pedal. As much as I liked
my FC7 for my Electro, this thing is a must for the XK3. Like its keyboard,
this adds as much to the realism of the Hammond experience, and playing the
XK3's keyboard and expression pedal is like driving a big Mercedes. Once
you've done it, you know what the fuss is all about.
The combination of the XK3 and Speakeasy and my Bulldog leslie was nothing
short of thrilling. The Speakeasy was singing after getting the added juice
of the XK3 (the Electro's output is very weak and I could never get the
overdrive I was looking for), and hit that thick, creamy grind I was looking
for pretty quickly. YESSSSS!!!!!!
I started with the "Jimmy 1" program as my base, and made a couple
adjustments from there, and saved it to a preset in the last bank. On a
couple of our songs, I have some extreme registration shifts that I would
not have been so adventurous with had I not been playing an Electro when we
started putting them together. Those songs are harder to get right on my
real Hammond because of the number of bars and levels used, but now, saving
them to a few black key presets, and I was totally in business. And what a
pleasure it is to have a Hammond that has more than 2 black key presets I
can use!!! Too F N cool!
The tone is much thicker and much much smoother than my Electro, and was
noticeable immediately. Of course the percussion is as well. It has a
fatter thunk than either of my cutdown Hammonds, and I found using the
"soft" button tamed it exquisitely; I could never use the "soft" button on
either of my Hammonds as it would tame it too much. C3 chorus, which I like
to use every once in a while on my Electro but not on my Hammonds, is still
a little strong, but as I noticed from the manual, that can be tamed pretty
quickly. C1 sounded great right away....I used it quite a bit. The
overdrive has a dedicated knob which I found I was playing with all night
long....very useful, and in conjunction with the Speakeasy and leslie, was
very musical. It has a groovy little feature which is an LED under the knob
that glows yellow (or was it green?) at its most minimum setting, glows more
amber then red the harder it's being pushed. Oh yeah, that's another area
where this is more like a REAL
Hammond: It's hard to see things in the dark, and you'll find yourself
wanting to learn the layout really quickly to navigate it and get what you
want the first time. The LCD is in the upper left corner, and if you have
the XK3 stacked on another keyboard, you won't be able to see it too well.
(I couldn't find a contrast adjustment anywhere either, but you probably
don't need: I couldn't see it so I can't verify that!) No big deal: Just
like a real Hammond, you have black preset keys to save your base settings
(except this Hammond won't require a tech to rewire 6 of them) and you'll
learn the location of your "spices" quick enough: and if you have played a
real Hammond for any length of time, everything is just about in the right
place, but like in the case of the percussion buttons, there are a couple
extra little things you want to make sure you're aware of so that you don't
hit the wrong thing. (The split and manual bass buttons are near the
percussion and in the dark at
first, you could accidentally grab them.) The drawbars, which looked to
be kinda funky in pictures, make total sense from a playing POV: The left
drawbars function as the "top manual" or top half of a potential split
keyboard and are comfortable to grab, and the right drawbars are for the
"lower manual" or bottom half of a split, and are in the right place for
that exactly. I found myself disengaging the split on my presets: I don't
play LH bass (my bassist despises when I get anywhere near his space, so I
respect that and grab a fist of piano instead), and the left side of the
split is only adjustable by ONE OCTAVE, which I think is an oversight on
Hammond's part. The Electro 73's lower split can be adjusted by a few
octaves, which makes left hand organ comping for your right piano or organ
playing sweet and comfortable as you can keep your left hand on the left
side of your keyboard! You can't do this on a real Hammond though, so it's
not a big deal...I'm used to that dilemma
when I use the cutdowns live, so I'm used to it. It would be a nice
update for the future though.
The keyboard itself is very inspiring to play, and I found myself
eschewing my normal piano parts over the weekend trying new things on the
XK3. The band loves the sound of the Hammond and would probably have no
problems with me playing nothing but organ, however there are still places I
think the piano is the way to go. But still, this thing sounded and felt
sooooooo good, that I couldn't resist when the urge hit, and it hit a lot.
After last night's gig, the guitarist came up to me and said this thing
sounded awesome. "Tony, I don't know nothin, I'm just a guitar player, but
that thing growled a lot, and sounded just....earthier!" (Sounds like he
knows plenty to me.) "Plus dude, no offense or anything, but it looks
cooler than that other thing, and it's not red." (First time I heard
anything negative about the Electro...lmao) But he was right on both
counts: it looked a hell of a lot cooler from where I was sitting. Oh yeah,
smears and thwacks sounded correct on this clone:
to my ears, doing smears on the Electro was dicey business; it's almost a
necessity in rock music, but on an Electro, the individual notes in a smear
sound too individual...there's too much seperation, whereas on the XK3, they
all blend into one another.
The midrange on the XK3 is sweet as hell, and I really think the upper
range on the XK3 sounds better than the Electro. As MT pointed out, you can
really get crazy with editing on the XK3 and save your own tonewheel
combinations, but judicious use of drawbars seemed to work just fine for me.
At the end of the night with the volume war, I even found myself using
88888888888 for the end of a solo; with the overdrive of the XK3 working
with the Speakeasy and Leslie, it sounded big without being shrill, and
that's not exactly a favorite sound of mine.
This thing is beautiful man, that's all I can say. Definitely my favorite
purchase of the last 5 years...in fact the only thing I've enjoyed as much
is my JD990 synth module, and my HammondStore cutdown, but this will get
used infinitely more than both of them. It's definitely a lot heavier than
my Electro (I really noticed that putting it on top of my Motif) but it
sounds a lot heavier too: a fair trade-off as far as I'm concerned. At this
point, IMO, this is the king of the clones (Leslie sim not evaluated of
course).
I'm taking my wife and boys out to a Cubs game today for Mothers Day, and
of course it's Sopranos tonite, so the odds are I won't get to play with it
any more this weekend, but tomorrow I'll start playing with it with no
leslie to check out the simulator. And the Pro-145.
Sorry to take up so much bandwidth, but this thing rocks.
T
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