suitandtieguy

Charles Earland had a limited vocabulary _only_ when it came to soloing. i used to hear a lot about how all his solos sounded the same and that crap. in fact, i let it affect my opinion of him that i never went up to see him when i had the chance ... and i had a lot of them since he was playing all the time until he died. a while after he died, i decided to revisit my impression of his music. then i really "got" it, and i felt terrible. Earland might have been a "predictable" soloist, and an unwavering bassist, but the man was a _brilliant_ bandleader and arranger. also: Leaving This Planet is totally amazing. he wanted to bring the electronic sounds in, but didn't want to lose touch of the groove and the dirt. so instead of trying to do something that left behind the traditional workflow, he decided to basically record a soul jazz record at Van Gelder's studio and layer a bunch of synths on the multitrack machine with Patrick Gleeson. i do wish that he'd done it without Gleeson's help, because it confuses what Charles did and what Pat did, but it's still a great record. anyone here fond of Earland's Jam? i really enjoy that one too.

a) Jimmy McGriff never modified his organ. the only organist who did any work to his own instrument was Groove Holmes, and he modded the hell out of it. it's actually impossible to get really severe key click out of a 122/147 from that period because of the frequency response of the Jensen V21 treble drivers they used. the only organist who really went out of his way for more click was Keith Emerson. he was using JBL midrange horn drivers in the cabinets the Hiwatts were driving, and the click on the first three ELP records (and _especially_ the very few live recordings we have from the period) is quite severe indeed. unfortunately someone came along and "fixed" Keith's organ rig in the 90s and it's sounded pretty dull and midrangey ever since. McGriff's appearance of more key click has to do with the way he played. you can see Chris Foreman nails this, if anyone can check him out live. anyone who wants to learn anything about the way McGriff did anything playing-wise needs to meet and spend time with that wonderful man. he probably also lucked out on the organ that was at whatever studio Sonny Lester was sending him to ... i'm assuming it was hooked up to a 147 ... they have a brighter back end which will accentuate the click a bit. also, there's one McGriff album where he's playing _Groove's_ organ: Main Squeeze. i don't know why, but that organ's tone and effects chain is identical to the one Groove was playing around the same time. it's possible that's the organ at the studio, but unlikely. i don't know of any studio that would change an organ that much. b) several big changes happened in Jimmy Smith's sound. the most striking of these has to do with Van Gelder, though ... who when he built his studio and stopped recording in restaurants and his parents' house, decided it would be a great idea to run the organ direct (doh!) instead of mic it all the time. the leslie was still miked up, but only occasionally cross-faded during sections when the organist kicked the motors on. that leslie is a 21H if anyone's interested. i think it might even be the 20 watt 6v6 version even. i really don't get into the sound of the Van Gelder Studio organ records, which is a shame because that's like ... most of them. i enjoy them despite their lack of bass and Leslie. to contrast, the sound on Groovin' At Small's totally kills. IMHO that's probably right up there with Giants of the Organ Live with "STG's Favourite Organ Records." something else that happened is in the late sixties Jimmy Smith stopped using vibrato-chorus, and started using 2-speed leslies. he also stopped playing any cool ballads like he did back in the 50s, for reasons which would escape me had the next sentence not occurred to me: it's very hard to get in the mood to play ballads when you're raging on Bolivian marching powder.

gene ludwig's a motherfucker. i'm so very glad that the first organ jazz record i ever hears, back when i was in seventh grade and had no clue what i just bought, was Organ Out Loud! good god how did i miss this?

that is correct. Sam Yahel is too super awesome a guy to let a horny deer and 3 more hours of driving get between him and my Hammond, if he needs her for a task.

yeah. i really don't know what to say about that. when i saw they were on the new STAX label i was pretty much dumbfounded. btw, it's nice to see Porcupine Tree fans on a soul jazz board. i'm not really into them, but my favourite album of all time might be Jansen & Barbieri's "Stone to Flesh."

a) yes. that's because when they started out they did a good job of sounding like old BN/Prestige tracks but more focused on uptempo stuff and now they do a bad job of sounding like Medeski Martin & Wood but without all that sonic exploration. they basically sold out to the hippie jam band juggarnaut ... trading their suits for hemp, and their ties for tie-dye. they epitomise everything that's wrong with that scene, a market that can take something totally cool and turn it into complete shit. b) Sam Yahel is a super awesome guy for whom i have driven on after hitting a deer with my van (totaled it even) to make sure he had an organ for the gig. in Chicago. Karl Denson's Tiny Universe was the best band i've seen play at Chillicothe's bullshit Summer Camp hippie fest. they're both guys whose acts i would always look forward to doing backline for again.

and direct. where the hell is the leslie!?!?!

of course not. but i will be forced to point out that when i first saw your icon i thought "holy shit someone on the Organissimo forum has a David Sylvian vs Holger Czukay vs Jon Hassell EP as their icon!" and then i took a second look to discover it was indeed a completely different album, which is probably just as good. here's the design-wise cousin of that Lester Bowie album:

only half on-topic here, but i'd just like to point out that eMusic.com is a _great_ place to find first and second wave acid jazz. i'm so glad it's there.

well it was a kind of vanity pressing, for the producer. he thought that he was going to start a label, and this appears to be his first and only release under the "Sison" label. apparently the saxophonist on that record still lives in STL, and plays out quite a bit. i need to go see him soon.

i'm delighted to hear this obviously important instrument is being kept by someone who respects and understands its relevance. it's quite unfortunate that the whereabouts of Groove's B3 are unknown, presumed destroyed.

solid-state vs tube is not as important as the fact that the envelope timing capacitor is too large, resulting in a completely different sound. Mike told me which one to change a few years ago but i never did. i can probably tell just by looking at it ... i should pull it out and see if i can do something about it.

the technique of how to recap is pretty much the only continuous flamewar in Hammondland. there are three schools: a) caps in a bag, matched to one another. not what was done at the factory. b) binning the caps down to fine tolerance and then matching them to each inductor. what was done at the factory. c) leaving it alone all three seem to be at odds with one another. i find myself in B and C, because they make the most sense to me. however, some fellow organists i like quite a bit have bought a bag-o-caps and liked them quite a bit. i'm sure there's a time and a place for everything, and if it sounds good it is good.. did you pull the manuals out of the front or the back? i've been into this shit for years and it never occurred to me to pull the manuals out of the back until today, and i'm looking at this thing thinking "oh yeah. i think they're actually supposed to come out the back." this monstrosity: swept through my studio earlier this year. it's a 195x B3 that has just been beat to hell in black churches its whole life. they wanted me to "fix that noise" which through investigation turned out to be basically a shit-tonne of work which had been performed half-assed by a "tech" who basically knew what he was doing but didn't give a crap enough to do it properly. i wound up cleaning the bussbars to discover that one of the tones which just wasn't working before was actually a _velocity_sensitive_cipher_ and now i'm having to figure out how to solve the problem. anyway, we took the manuals out of the front but now i'm feeling incredibly stupid for that. live and learn, whatever. oh btw this organ sounded fucking fantastic when i was done with it. i also retensioned the keys to Groove Holmes weight to preserve the already-damaged bussbars. i caught some shit for that but bent them back to limited-lifespan position in less than a half-hour with some short bent-nose pliers. if you want to hear that ex-Skynard rig (including the leslie it was mated to), i recorded a cover of King Crimson's "Easy Money" with it which is up on our myspace space. "Root Down" and "DIG on these blues" were with the C2/Minimoog/122, and "For your own good" is an R-100 which has since became parts due to being evicted from its home. yeah i'm quite up for that aspect of it. my C2 has been my trusty companion for my entire organ-playing life. recapping is so not even in the radar, except for the delay line. it's a cusper ... it has the smooth drawbars and metal expression pedal. i don't think i could have asked for a better organ to find when i decided "yeah i need to own a Hammond." i would like to rebuild the AO-10 preamp in that thing though. i also need to change the timing cap in the TrekII percussion unit as "fast" just isn't quite as snappy as i expect to hear. that unit also adds an undefeatable click artefact which i find extremely pleasant.

the brightness that i'm talking about is actually top end click volume. i actually want a _dull_ generator, which is why the idea of recapping my generator scares the living shit out of me, but apparently this B3 i just got is so damn uneven i think i might have to. if i _do_ recap, i'm going to build a cap switching box and recap this thing the way it was done at the factory ... sorting the caps down to .1% tolerance and using a DVM to measure what narrow capcitance range tunes the filter properly. i'll probably add the RC networks as well. i'll check it out for the work i do for other people. however, i used to have an 860 and have missed the tone of the PD60 ever since i stopped using the 860. at the time there were no commercially-available adaptors like the ploethera of spindle plates we have now, so i had to leave it behind.

thanks. it's in the 71000s, but looking at the construction of the music desk makes me think it's a '57. also, the fact that it was delivered to the house by Lyon & Healy on April 20th, 1958 makes me think it was probably actually built in 1957. the back edge of the music desk immediately in front and below the piano hinge is an hard edge instead of a rounded bevel. you can tell in the photos. because AO-28s all sound dull to my ears unless they've been rebuilt, and rebuilding an AO-28 is very expensive compared to something simple like a Leslie amp. moving to a TrekII preamp will make all the nice controls and interfacing i want (fx loop to begin with) significantly easier. i recently did a signifiacnt amount of work on a poorly-maintained late fifties B3 that had been painted Krylon white (!!) and had an SSP-3 in it. by the time i was done with it (bussbar cleaning/lubrication, resoldering all drawbar terminals, 122 amp rebuild, Atlas PD60 replacing Jensen V21) i was blown away by how good it sounded. and since this thread is about pictures of organs, here's a photo of where my rig was at by the time we got fired from the only regular gig we had late last year: yes. that entire rig (with 122 and 2 Mackie SR1530s) made it to our last gig. after we were fired i said "fuck this. i'm going to go on hiatus until i get a trailer." it might seem completely obscene, but there at the end we were just a duet organ/drums and i was trying to bridge the gap between Klaus Schulze and Jimmy McGriff, which _requires_ an obscene amount of gear. all that stuff off to the left is probably going to get put into a large rolling rack with a modular synthesiser, and eventually i'd like to replace the Juno-6 with a Jupiter-8. i might be able to leave the Minimoog at home if i did that (the Juno isn't good for mono leads. i used it for colourful arpeggios and ambient textures with the Eventide and looping delay.)