Get some Hammond in your soul
August 20, 2018 6:35 AM   Subscribe

For your listening pleasure: The Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio live. Why yes old timer, it does remind one of the wonderful Jimmy Smith, doesn't it? Happy Monday, y'all.
posted by gwint (27 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is great stuff, thanks!

I can’t help but wonder when the last tonewheel will spin though; good playing like this makes me ruminate on the looming extinction of electromechanical keyboards. A lot of money and skilled technicians have kept many alive these past decades, but today digital similacra can fool all but the best ears for pennies on the dollar, and soon nobody will be able to distinguish them reliably.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:46 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Fortunately, the tonewheel sound is the easiest sound to reproduce digitally, and there's really no reason to lump around a giant cabinet to produce a sound that is indistinguishable from the original source when the things that count on an organ (key action, drawbars, rotating speaker) are perfectly suited to digital instruments. Nothing is lost in the transition except back injuries.
posted by sonascope at 6:57 AM on August 20, 2018


Fortunately, the tonewheel sound is the easiest sound to reproduce digitally, and there's really no reason to lump around a giant cabinet to produce a sound that is indistinguishable from the original source when the things that count on an organ (key action, drawbars, rotating speaker) are perfectly suited to digital instruments. Nothing is lost in the transition except back injuries.

Not sure if I agree. There's something about having leslie cabinets both on stage right and stage left yet another meta-layer of phase cancellation. The swirlies are swirling MORE!
posted by mikelieman at 7:02 AM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


I recently played a gig where instead of plugging my bass into a bunch of pedals and then through a stack of amps, I went directly into Logic Pro on my laptop and out into a mixer straight to the PA. Sounded great and I was able to have pre-programmed instruments ready for each song. Meanwhile, another band that night, whose members were half my age, had a dozen pedals they used to knob twiddle constantly-- and they also sounded great.

Which is to say that art and entertainment have an aesthetic quality as well as a technical one and sometimes those qualities are one and the same (just the sound that is finally output, say) and sometimes they diverge-- the feel of the instrument, the tactile elements, the look, the image the audience sees, and yes even the sheer weight of it all.

So I think there's always going to be this push and pull between new tech and old in art are we're luckier for that interplay.
posted by gwint at 7:10 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


the tonewheel sound is the easiest sound to reproduce digitally

I remember about 25 years ago, a very good keyboard player (who now runs a post-production studio) telling me that the most difficult classic keyboard sound to simulate well was the Hammond organ; in his opinion, none of the solutions available were good. Now, that was a long time ago, and progress has been made in digital sound - you are even seeing guitar players who were deeply, deeply into tube amps switching to things like the Kemper profiler - but, if there are good organ emulators now, it wasn't always the case.
posted by thelonius at 7:21 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is all very much on my mind as I'm preparing a conference talk on simulating the Hammond and Leslie! That Delvon Lamarr set is one of my favorite recent bits of Hammond, and what amazing guitar from Jimmy James. That set is available on the audio streaming sites too.

Another recent find: Cory Henry grooving on Stevie with Dr. Lonnie Smith hanging out behind him.

I feel like the B-3 itself is relatively straightforward to simulate, though there are a lot of small things to get right in order to satisfy good ears. The Leslie took a lot more time to nail, and there's good new work on modeling that as recently as 2016: Doppler Simulation and the Leslie. I like this paper a lot–it models the Leslie as many sound sources corresponding to the most important reflections rather than a rotating element.

The other thing that has taken a very long time is the physical interface. Few manufacturers have the resources to develop their own keybeds, and a Hammond doesn't exactly fit into the MIDI model of a key down event with velocity. Each drawbar is activated at a different point as the key is pressed. It sounds like Hammond-Suzuki's new keybed in the XK-5 may be a big step forward.
posted by (parenthetic me) at 8:16 AM on August 20, 2018 [5 favorites]


here's something about having leslie cabinets both on stage right and stage left yet another meta-layer of phase cancellation.

My point being that you plug your Leslie into your digital organ. A modern rotary speaker sounds fine and isn't immense. The Leslie is the hard emulation, so you use the real thing. The tonewheels, on the other hand, are just oscillators in a mechanical additive synthesizer, and even the fuzzy edges like tonewheel leakage are easy to emulate in a way that even experts can't distinguish them in a blind A/B. Heck, you can push it through a vacuum tube amp circuit if you like, for that fully shaggy sound, and still have an instrument that normal people can afford and transport.

Of course, people cling to these "this sound is impossible to do digitally," because it's a great thing to reinforce the idea of authority, which is how we end up with something as silly as a modern big-buck Mellotron recreation instead of, you know, a sampler.

On the original post, though, nice. I wish more people knew what a beautiful sound organ has.
posted by sonascope at 8:25 AM on August 20, 2018


Something I'd like to add, too, is that as an electronics-based musician, the Hammond was always my perfect rejoinder to all the people who moaned about how the synthesizer was inherently inexpressive and unsubtle, yada yada yada, because the fantastic thing about a B3 and its ilk is that they are, in a fundamental way, inexpressive, as they're not sensitive to velocity, pressure, or release, and your control comes down to a very limited collection of things, like note, harmonic mix, Leslie, and swell...and people took an instrument that isn't responsive in the way that guitar or piano are and found the musicianship within the limitations of the machine and went to amazing, joyful places with it.

It's an inspiration for anyone with an instrument to find those limitations and somehow break them.
posted by sonascope at 8:34 AM on August 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've been digging this cat's grooves for a while now. glad to see it here on the Blue. hope to see him when he's in town next month.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:40 AM on August 20, 2018


(parenthetic me): The other thing that has taken a very long time is the physical interface. Few manufacturers have the resources to develop their own keybeds

Not to mention the foot pedals.
posted by clawsoon at 9:04 AM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


Mooooooore! And yeah @sonascope, so many personal styles. Constraints breed creativity:
Booker T. Jones: Tiny Desk Concert
Dr. Lonnie Smith demoing the XK5
Chester Thompson: Squib Cakes
posted by (parenthetic me) at 9:06 AM on August 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


This is great - just what I needed today after making the mistake of reading the news...
posted by PhineasGage at 9:28 AM on August 20, 2018


Ah Dr. Lonnie Smith. Just heard live last season. Now I'm enjoying my after-work beer even more than before...
posted by Namlit at 9:56 AM on August 20, 2018


I’m the proud owner of an Oberheim OB-3, which blew my teenage mind in the 90’s. It’s been sitting in my garage for a decade but I may have to pull it out to see if it still amazes.
posted by q*ben at 10:39 AM on August 20, 2018


I stumbled upon that original link just after it was posted in summer 2017, and have come back to watch it a number of times since then. One of the things about getting old – i.e., as somebody who was buying one Jimmy Smith album after another 50+ years ago – is finding new music that still has enough elements of the sounds you’ve grown up with, and DLO3 definitely has been the best discovery along those lines in a long while.

There's also an actual set by the trio from that day, but I like the ‘warm-up’ set better.
posted by LeLiLo at 1:49 PM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Also, The True Loves feature all of The Delvon Lamarr Trio minus Delvon Lamarr plus horns, bass, and more.

Not sure why I have a sudden urge to wear a suit.
posted by gwint at 2:25 PM on August 20, 2018


Not to mention the foot pedals

I'd never heard of Barbara Dennerlein before, I'll definitely be checking out more of her fantastic playing. Thanks clawsoon!
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:55 PM on August 20, 2018


As someone who learned of Jimmy Smith in LeLiLo's bedroom, it's great to see Smith on YouTube. He's way cool. I heard Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf long before I saw the movie.
A neighbor recently acquired a Leslie cabinet and I helped him build a guitar interface for it. It sounds fabulous. I think better than a Doppler simulator. (but maybe I'm prejudiced)
posted by MtDewd at 4:57 PM on August 20, 2018


Speaking of the organ, your life is not yet complete unless you have seen Ethel Smith in action.

You think the boys' club is wicked on the basslines? Try it in heels.
posted by sonascope at 5:25 PM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


Whoa.
posted by gwint at 6:21 PM on August 20, 2018


I hate to make it a competition, but if we're doing feats of organ footwork by heels-wearers, Cameron Carpenter's arrangement of the Revolutionary Etude seems kind of obligatory.

(Quick googling suggests heels are actually considered a plus for organist's shoes, though, so I guess it's not just a style thing.)

(And, apologies for the non-Hammond organ video.)
posted by floppyroofing at 6:32 PM on August 20, 2018


the wonderful Jimmy Smith

Not only wonderful, but incredible, or depending on your import restrictions, unpredictable.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:13 PM on August 20, 2018


floppyroofing: Quick googling suggests heels are actually considered a plus for organist's shoes, though

Not to mention Dr. Becky Carlton's long nails clicking on the keys.

A couple more to add to the mix: Dominique Johnson, Debra Freeman.
posted by clawsoon at 4:20 AM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


Speaking of the organ, your life is not yet complete unless you have seen Ethel Smith in action.

There's this incredible pan from her right side, over the keyboard, through her left side and then back to right. They must have mounted the track on the ceiling. Or the whole stage is rotating. I don't know but it's wonderful.
posted by mikelieman at 5:50 AM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


Not sure why I have a sudden urge to wear a suit.

Suits are inherently musical
posted by thelonius at 6:05 AM on August 21, 2018


My favorite Jimmy Smith detail is that he'd always push in the drawbars when he was done, so no one would see his registrations.
posted by sonascope at 8:57 AM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


Suits are inherently musical.

Especially the bigger suits.
posted by LeLiLo at 11:58 AM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


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