From anotherscott@hotmail.com Tue May 18 07:38:34 2010
Subject:Re: Clonewheel Shootout 2010

re: "They do evaluate all the clones through a real leslie in the last few videos"

I really think that part is a bit of a waste. Really, how many people are lugging leslie speakers around? And if you're looking for something in a non-mobile situation (studio, church, etc.), if you're going to have a real Leslie, what's the great appeal of a 30 pound simulator, why not just use a Hammond? (Okay, yeah, service and availability issues.) Also, different Leslies sound different, so more than telling you how the organ sounds through a real Leslie, the demonstration tells you how it sounds through that particular Leslie. I don't want to say that the demonstration was entirely worthless, but they seemed to take a lot of trouble and a lot of the percentage of the demo time evaluating something that's probably not all that useful to very many people.

I would have stuck with listening (a) through their own Leslie simulations, (b) maybe a bit with no Leslie simulation, and (c) with a Ventilator, which would still give people who want to put it through a real Leslie some point of reference, and would have created results that can be replicated by anyone, and would have accomplished the goal of comparing the basic sounds of the units to each other through a common Leslie effect rather than having each one's Leslie sound based only on the quirks of its own built in Leslie effect.

But the biggest problem was something that Tom Coster (?) said... Unless the users are going to take the time to learn how to tweak them, you're not comparing the organs as much as you are comparing the tastes of the programmers who came up with their default settings. If some units defaulted to "clean" settings while others defaulted to "vintage" settings with leakage and possibly other shifts in tonal character, how can you really compare them? And what if some have their Leslie amp/speaker modeling switched in, and others don't? (Which is different from the rotary effect itself, of course.) At a minimum, the moderator should have set them all to the ostensibly cleanest setting, no amp/speaker modeling, no distortion, no EQ, etc., which would have provided a reasonably fair starting point for a comparison, as they all have such a setting, which would expose the basic character of the unit. We know he didn't do that, because he makes various comments about certain things that the players were hearing, along the lines of "that's an adjustable parameter, that's in there intentionally," that kind of thing.

But of course, no organ sounds its best in its pure clean mode... the beauty of the Hammond sound is in all the added "imperfections." So then I'd have let each of the players approximate their favorite sounds on the real Hammond and Leslie in the room (as close as they could get with that particular sample), and have someone who knows each instrument (perhaps the moderator?) try to tweak each clone to see how close he could get it, and then see how satisfied these players were (or try to address where they still felt something fell short). It still wouldn't have been perfect, as even a "reference" Hammond is an elusive target, but at least there would have been some basis for comparison.

As it was, we heard these players comparing these units on, basically, random settings (apart from the normal user controls they were familiar with, CV, drawbars, etc.). Each one of those organs has multiple characters that could have been dialed in, we really don't know what they were comparing.

Also, they should have had a real rock player in there. None of the players were going for a 70s screaming classic rock or progressive rock approach, they seemed to gravitate toward jazz playing. But maybe I'm just showing my age. :-)