Hammond B3
Hammond B3 (dual manual)
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The author first implemented the Hammond module, then extended it to the B3
emulation. Users of this are too numerous to mention and the organ is still
popular. Jimmy Smith, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Kieth Emerson, Doors and
almost all american gospel blues. Smith was profuse, using the instrument for
a jazz audience, even using its defects (key noise) to great effect. Emerson
had two on stage, one to play and another to kick around, even including
stabbing the keyboard with a knife to force keylock during performances
(Emerson was also a Moog fan with some of the first live performances). He
also used the defects of the system to great effect, giving life to the over-
driven Hammond sound.
The Hammond was historically a mechanical instrument although later cheaper
models used electronics. The unit had a master motor that rotated at
the speed of the mains supply. It drove a spindle of cog wheels and next to
each cog was a pickup. The pickup output went into the matrix of the harmonic
drawbars. It was originally devised to replace the massive pipe organs in
churches - Hammond marketed their instruments with claims that they could not be
differentiated from the mechanical pipe equivalent. He was taken to court by
the US government for misrepresentation, finally winning his case using a double
blind competitive test against a pipe organ, in a cathedral, with speakers
mounted behind the organ pipes and an array of music scholars, students and
professionals listening. The results spoke for themselves - students would
have scored better by simply guessing which was which, the professionals
fared only a little better than that. The age of the Hammond organ had arrived.
The company had a love/hate relationship with the Leslie speaker company - the
latter making money by selling their rotary speakers along with the organ to
wide acceptance. The fat hammond 'chorus' was a failed attempt to distance
themselves from Leslie. That was never achieved due to the acceptance of the
Leslie, but the chorus did add another unique sound to the already awesome
instrument. The rotary speaker itself still added an extra something to the
unique sound that is difficult imagine one without the other. It has a wide
range of operating modes most of which are included in this emulator.
The chorus emulation is an 8 stage phase shifting filter algorithm with a
linear rotor between the taps.
Parameterisation of the first B3 window follows the original design:
Leslie: Rotary speaker on/off
Reverb: Reverb on/off
VibraChorus: 3 levels of vibrato, 3 of chorus.
Bright: Added upper harmonics to waveforms.
Lower and Upper Manual Drawbars: The drawbars are colour coded into white for
even harmonics and black for odd harmonics. There are two subfrequencies in
brown. The number given here are the length of organ pipe that would
correspond to the given desired frequency.
16 - Lower fundamental
5 1/3 - Lower 3rd fundamental
8 - Fundamental
4 - First even harmonic
2 2/3 - First odd harmonic
2 - Second even harmonic
1 3/5 - Second odd harmonic
1 1/3 - Third odd harmonic
1 - Third even harmonic
The drawbars are effectively mixed for each note played. The method by which
the mixing is done is controlled in the options section below. There were
numerous anomalies shown by the instrument and most of them are emulated.
The Hammond could provide percussives effect the first even and odd harmonics.
This gave a piano like effect and is emulated with Attack/Decay envelope.
Perc 4' - Apply percussive to the first even harmonic
Perc 2 2/3' - Apply percussive to the first odd harmonic
Slow - Adjust rate of decay from about 1/2 second to 4 seconds.
Soft - Provide a soft attack to each note.
The soft attack is an attempt to reduce the level of undesired key noise. The
keyboard consisted of a metal bar under each key that made physical contact
with 9 sprung teeth to tap off the harmonics. The initial contact would generate
noise that did not really accord to the pipe organ comparison. This was
reduced by adding a slow start to each key, but the jazz musicians had used
this defect to great effect, terming it 'key click' and it became a part of
the Hammond characteristics. Some musicians would even brag about how noisy
there organ was.
On the left had side are three more controls:
Volume potentiometer
Options switch discussed below.
Rotary Speed: low/high speed Leslie rotation. Shifts between the speeds
are suppressed to emulate the spin up and down periods of the leslie motors.
The options section, under control of the options button, has the parameters
used to control the emulation. These are broken into sections and discussed
individually.
Leslie:
The Leslie rotary speaker consisted of a large cabinet with a bass speaker and
a pair of high frequency air horns. Each were mounted on its own rotating table
and driven around inside the cabinet by motors. A crossover filter was used to
separate the frequencies driven to either speaker. Each pair was typically
isolated physically from the other. As the speaker rotated it would generate
chorus type effects, but far richer in quality. Depending on where the speaker
was with respect to the listener the sound would also appear to rotate. There
would be different phasing effects based on signal reflections, different
filtering effects depending on where the speaker was in respect to the cabinet
producing differences resonances with respect to the internal baffling.
Separate:
Sync:
No Bass:
The Leslie had two motors, one for the horns and one for the voice coil
speaker. These rotated at different speeds. Some players preferred to
have both rotate at the same speed, would remove the second motor and
bind the spindles of each speaker table, this had the added effect
that both would also spin up at the same rate, not true of the
separated motors since each table had a very different rotary moment.
The 'No Bass' option does not rotate the voice coil speaker. This was
typically done since it would respond only slowly to speed changes,
this left just the horns rotating but able to spin up and down faster.
Brake:
Some cabinets had a brake applied to the tables such that when the
motor stopped the speakers slowed down faster.
X-Over:
This is the cross over frequency between the voice coil and air horns.
Uses a butterworth filter design.
Inertia:
Rate at which speaker rotational speed will respond to changes.
Overdrive:
Amount by which the amplifier is overdriven into distortion.
H-Depth/Frequency/Phase
L-Depth/Frequency/Phase
These parameters control the rotary phasing effect. The algorithm used
has three differently phased rotations used for filtering, phasing and
reverberation of the sound. These parameters are used to control the
depth and general phasing of each of them, giving different parameters
for the high and low speed rotations. There are no separate parameters
for the voice coil or air horns, these parameters are for the two
different speeds only, although in 'Separate' mode the two motors will
rotate at slightly different speeds.
Chorus
V1/C1 - Lowest chorus speed
V2/C2 - Medium chorus speed
V3/C3 - High chorus speed
Percussion:
Decay Fast/Slow - controls the percussive delay rates.
Attack Slow Fast - Controls the per note envelope attack time.
The percussives are emulated as per the original design where there was a
single envelope for the whole keyboard and not per note. The envelope will only
restrike for a cleanly pressed note.
Finally there are several parameters affecting the sine wave generation code.
The Hammond used cogged wheels and coil pickups to generate all the harmonics,
but the output was not a pure sine wave. This section primarily adjusts the
waveform generation:
Preacher:
The emulator has two modes of operation, one is to generate the
harmonics only for each keyed note and another to generate all of
them and tap of those required for whatever keys have been pressed.
Both work and have different net results. Firstly, generating each
note independently is far more efficient than generating all 90 odd
teeth, as only a few are typically required. This does not have totally
linked phases between notes and cannot provide for signal damping (see
below).
The Preacher algorithm generates all harmonics continuously as per the
original instrument. It is a better rendition at the expense of large
chunks of CPU activity. This is discussed further below.
Compress:
Time compress the sine wave to produce a slightly sharper leading edge.
Bright:
Add additional high frequency harmonics to the sine.
Click:
Level of key click noise
Reverb:
Amount of reverb added by the Leslie
Damping:
If the same harmonic was reused by different pressed keys then its net
volume would not be a complete sum, the output gain would decay as the
pickups would become overloaded. This would dampen the signal strength.
This is only available with the Preacher algorithm.
The two reverse octaves are presets as per the original, however here they can
just be used to recall the first 23 memories of the current bank. The lower
manual 12 key is the 'save' key for the current settings and must be double
clicked. It should be possible to drive these keys via MIDI, not currently
tested though. The default presets are a mixture of settings, the lower
manual being typical 'standard' recital settings, the upper manual being a
mixture of Smith, Argent, Emerson, Winwood and other settings from the well
known Hammond Leslie FAQ. You can overwrite them. As a slight anomaly, which
was intentional, loading a memory from the these keys only adjusts the visible
parameters - the drawbars, leslie, etc. The unseen ones in the options panel
do not change. When you save a memory with a double click on the lower manual
last reverse key then in contrast it saves all the parameters. This will not
change.
The Preacher algorithm supports a diverse set of options for its tonewheel
emulation. These are configured in the file $BRISTOL/memory/profiles/tonewheel
and there is only one copy. The file is a text file and will remain that way,
it is reasonably documented in the file itself. Most settings have two ranges,
one representing the normal setting and the other the bright setting for when
the 'bright' button is pressed. The following settings are currently available:
ToneNormal: each wheel can be given a waveform setting from 0 (square)
through to 1.0 (pure sine) to X (sharpening ramp).
EQNormal: each wheel can be given a gain level across the whole generator.
DampNormal: each wheel has a damping factor (level robbing/damping/stealing)
BusNormal: each drawbar can be equalised globally.
ToneBright: each wheel can be given a waveform setting from 0 (square)
through to 1.0 (pure sine) to X (sharpening ramp) for the bright button.
EQBright: each wheel can be given a gain level across the whole generator.
DampBright: each wheel has a damping factor (level robbing/damping/stealing)
BusBright: each drawbar can be equalised globally.
stops: default settings for the eight drawbar gain levels.
The default is 8 linear stages.
wheel: enables redefining the frequency and phase of any given tonewheel
The defaults are the slightly non Even Tempered frequencies of the
Hammond tonewheels. The tonewheel file redefines the top 6 frequencies
that were slightly more out of tune due to the 192-teeth wheels and
a different gear ratio.
crosstalk: between wheels in a compartment and adjacent drawbar busses.
This is one area that may need extensions for crosstalk in the wiring
loom. Currently the level of crosstalk between each of the wheels in
the compartment can be individually defined, and drawbar bus crosstalk
also.
compartment: table of the 24 tonewheel compartments and associated wheels.
resistors: tapering resister definitions for equalisation of gains per
wheel by note by drawbar.
taper: definition of the drawbar taper damping resistor values.
Improvements would come with some other alterations to the sine waveforms and
some more EQ put into the leslie speaker. The speaker has three speeds, two of
which are configurable and the third is 'stopped'. Changes between the different
rates is controlled to emulate inertia.
The net emulation, at least of the preacher algorithm, is reasonable, it is
distinctively a Hammond sound although it does not have quite as much motor
or spindle noise. The Bright button gives a somewhat rawer gearbox. It could do
with a better amplifier emulation for overdrive.
The damping algorithms is not quite correct, it has dependencies on which keys
are pressed (upper/lower manual). Options drop shadow is taken from the wrong
background bitmap so appears in an inconsistent grey.