From organtec@charter.net Tue May 18 08:07:00 2010
Subject:Re: Clonewheel Shootout 2010

Actually they all should have been set ,as you said, to clean with no
additional ad ins. And no sims on.just pure organ sound. Yes there is a
sound that Hammond shot for in production, many varied one side or the other
from it, but all but one or two COULD sound as spec'd if they took the time
in production to put them there.



From: CloneWheel@yahoogroups.com [mailto:CloneWheel@yahoogroups.com] On
Behalf Of AnotherScott2
Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 10:38 AM
To: CloneWheel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [CWSG] 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. :-)

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