From the course: Learning the Arturia Collection

B3 organ history - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Learning the Arturia Collection

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B3 organ history

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- [Nate Mars] The tone wheel organ was first released in the mid 1930's and various models were produced over the following forty years. Tone wheel organs were originally aimed at churches because they were more compact and affordable than traditional and much larger pipe organs. They generated sound by creating an electric current and then rotating a metal tone wheel near an electromagnetic pick-up. These organs found favor first with gospel musicians and soon after that jazz musicians picked them up as well. This was thanks to features like the organ's drawbars and various tone controls, as well as, the rotating speaker called the the Leslie cabinet. The Hammond B-3, which is the instrument Arturia virtual model is based on, was a staple of popular music from it's creation in the 1930's and it remains popular today. The Hammond organ is an electric organ, invented by Laurens Hammond and John M. Hanert. The original instrument works by having 91 tone wheels. Each key is connected to a fixed set of tone wheel outputs and the drawbar settings control how these are mixed together before being sent to the preamp. The two pre amps shape the sound a little bit further with things like natural distortion or saturation and filtering, also, factoring the position of the expression pedal which acts not only as a volume control, but, effects the frequency response of the preamp as well. Finally, the output of the preamp is connected to the speaker. The speaker being simulated is the Leslie cabinet. It contains a powerful amplifier, that drives a rotating horn and a stationary woofer, firing into a rotating drum reflector. The speaker actually determines many interesting spatial and frequency shifting effects, in addition to the sound shaping effects of common loudspeakers. Aside from jazz, it went on and was heavily used by rock musicians in the 1970's. A lot of clubs would actually buy one and leave it in residence, similar to pioneer CDJ's for UDJ's watching now. Some popular B-3 users include, Jimmy Smith, John Medeski, Keith Emerson, Cory Henry, and many more.

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