From tonysounds@yahoo.com Tue Feb 26 09:55:06 2008
Subject:Re: Organ Ignorance in Big Box Stores

Please, let’s not forget how much of this is Hammond’s doing in the first place. Since I was of the age (I started playing at 10 years old in 1972) there were music stores that sold guitars, amps, other stringed instruments, accordions and sheet music (and generally gave lessons), and then there were piano/organ stores. If you wanted to look at an organ, you weren’t going to find it in a music store, you had to go to an organ store. Understandable enough. But that never really changed until the Xb2 (really chanced with the XK2) where you could at least mail order a Hammond clonewheel. When the analog CX3 came out back in the 80s, that was the first drawbar organ a music store ever saw. (Remember instruments of similar vintage were the Roland RS organ, which had no drawbars, just 4 presets!). So everybody knew what the CX3 was because they’d never seen anything like it and of course, the Hammond was all over popular music in an upfront substantial way, unlike much pop
today, where the Hammond is buried beneath layers of Fantom/Motif/Triton/VST sludge. It’s there, but you have to know what you’re listening for. Combine that with the public’s general ignorance about everything (you know the same things we’re griping about here are the same things we experience when we go to get lost at HomeDepot/Menards, BestBuy/CircuitCity) and you have the blind leading the hard of seeing.

Lou C wrote: --- djacques@csulb.edu wrote:
> And all this surprises me with the tremendous amount
> of Hammond used in modern music. What do these kids
> think that big wooden thing on stage is? I see a
> B3 used on stage for most big acts.

Yeah, me too. It's used in almost every kind of
music, yet the stores seem to be ignorant about organs
in general. What someone else wrote was right: you
better know exactly what you want because the store
can only "order it" for you.

Probably it is a decision by big box management that,
although organs are used everywhere, the big sellers
will be the synths. So what happens is people come
into the store and demand that organ sounds come out
of their synth. Then they compromise on the organ
sound from the synth because, "Hey, that's what the
store had."

So if the big box stores are tending to drive things,
they will probably want to see more things done in the
same unit: samples, organs, mono synths, sound
effects, percussion, etc. And that seems to be the
way it's going.

Keep the sound spinning,

Lou

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