Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Is anyone else here smitten by them?

I started out as a keyboard player. Why? The old man (Alphonse, progenitor of our chromosomic potpourri) had this accordion...we were/are Polish, with a strong genetic propensity toward polka music. I never took a lesson--too poor--but did pull the case out from the closet and managed to learn a few basic chords going by ear. My friends put together a Beatles band in late '64, so there I was--there were already two guitarists and a bassist, so I (besides being disposable and painfully aware of it) became the keyboardist by default and inclination.

After two non-paying gigs, I was put on notice by the band-leader, once-best-friend Gus, whose parents had a bit more money, that unless I got a proper keyboard, I was going to be mustered out. So I took the only money I had--$55.00 that I'd received for my 16th birthday, supplemented by a loan from my grandmother for $25.00--and found a German mom-and-pop music store on Lincoln Ave. in Chicago which had a portable P-18 Farfisa in stock--for $80.00. It sort of met the appearance criteria--light gray two-tone Tolex--with a nice bling medallion on the top that said, "Portorgan Farfisa", which made me the butt of endless gags at the whim of the band leader/former best buddy, whose sarcasm knew no bounds.

It was a reed organ; essentially a chord organ version of an accordion with a motor and blower instead of a bellows. It had one sound, and once I mounted a crystal mic element inside and wired that to a pot, I could at least control the volume. Still, listeners complained about the shrillness.

Now I look back and am amused at how unlike any real combo organ it was--too small, too limited, and too square. As in not hip. As defined by sixteen-year-old sensibilities, anyway (did I just perpetrate an oxymoron?).

A couple of years back, I bought a nice P-18 for something like $45.00, identical to the $80.00 one from 1965. Here it is...pathetic, but my age has given me a sense of nostalgic, absurdist humor:



Well, in '04, I started collecting '60s combo organs, and I'm a bit abashed at the number that I have managed to accumulate, along with a 25-year-old lady organ tech who I keep in plane tickets to Amsterdam, apparently (at least, that's where she was last week). I've got the "usual", some in duplicate; along with some oddballs, too. About 10% work right out of the box. I've learned the ins and outs of shipping them to avoid damage, as most are large/heavy/delicate.

Yesterday the set shown below arrived, and every feature worked right out of the box. It's a '67 Baldwin, according to Barry Carson, who "wrote the book" on transistor combo organs and who is the former owner of this mint condition example, and is one of less than 100 ever made. As you can see, it was styled to match their line of "Supersound" solid state amplifiers. The organ/amp pair is a real rarity (have you ever seen another outside of a Baldwin line catalog?).



In setting up the Baldwin, I was struck at the similarity between its styling and that of the P-18 Farfisa. So I posed 'em together. It reminds me of a FIAT trying to pass a Peterbilt. The Farfisa (FIAT), made in Italy by the same company that made the Combo Compact, is just too precious, and petite in sound, too. The Baldwin, built in the USA, which is rare in the combo organ biz, is the Peterbilt. It's a tank.



If anyone else out there uses vintage combos, do join me in posting pics. Otherwise, get ready for an onslaught of Farfisas, Elkas, Gibsons, Lowreys, Teiscos, a WERSI, two or three Hammonds, and of course, my lovely VOXes. We're talking mostly '60s vintage stuff here--by 1971 or so it was all over as ICs took over and led to the Golden Age of analog synths.

Dare I mention that I'm looking for a replacement for my long-lost and lamented ARP Quadra?

I have a reed organ not unlike the one in your photos. It's a different brand but it is probably the same inside.
Don't they have a wonderful smell when they are running........
My brother has a funny combo organ floating and I've got some a few analogue quirkies at home too.
Anyone heard of the Korg ES-50 Lambda?
emac.

I know nothing about combo organs, but damn that Baldwin looks cool.

Well Paul, these aren't as vintage as yours but are still sought after pieces. These belong to my keyboard player.




A couple of these aren't vintage so I won't name them. Anyhow, there's a Roland Juno 60 which I believe is the last digitally controlled analog board, a Sequential Circuits Pro 1, a Clavinet that once belonged to Grand Funk, a Rhodes Suitcase Mark II, Mini Moog, Arp Pro Soloist, Arp Odyssey, Arp String Ensemble and a DX7 which makes a decent controller. The bottom pic is a Memory Moog and not pictured a Wurlitzer 200 which now resides in my basement studio. All boards in perfect working order.

Cheers,
Bill

My vintage organ is........ um... best we not go there!!

I've a Farfisa Matador purchased in 1976 for the wife,but she never really took to it, and now She's Not There(lol) but the organ still is.Tonewise it's good for 96 Tears and tunes like that, but it is a pain to haul out....so it stays put.

byu wrote:Well Paul, these aren't as vintage as yours but are still sought after pieces. These belong to my keyboard player.






A couple of these aren't vintage so I won't name them. Anyhow, there's a Roland Juno 60 which I believe is the last digitally controlled analog board, a Sequential Circuits Pro 1, a Clavinet that once belonged to Grand Funk, a Rhodes Suitcase Mark II, Mini Moog, Arp Pro Soloist, Arp Odyssey, Arp String Ensemble and a DX7 which makes a decent controller. The bottom pic is a Memory Moog and not pictured a Wurlitzer 200 which now resides in my basement studio. All boards in perfect working order.

Cheers,
Bill

The Juno 60 kicks..nice fat tone...I believe the Juno 106 came after ..also analog...nice collection....you too Paul....

I had an early 60s Hammond M-3 organ in dead mint condition I got for FREE from a retired music teacher. When I had to move in to a small apartment, I put it in my Aunts bomb shelter. Well, as luck would have it, it wasn't untill recently I had a place to actually put it. Unfortunately,her daughter and kids moved back in and needed to get rid of it, and having nowhere to put it, I reluctantly agreed to her putting up an ad on the bulletin board at her factory.

That same night,2 guys came over and looked at it, and begged her to keep it for them for 1 day, as they needed to get 2 more guys and a truck. The next day, they picked it up, and now it gets properly played a few times a week in a big southern baptist church. I am happy that it's owners not only know how to play it, but really love and appreciate it for what it is. I couldn't have asked for a better home for it.

I also had a Lowery Teenie Genie organ I was given for helping a neighbor move that I used to play horror movie themes on. Ended up trying to have a friend learn keyboards on it for my band at the time, but he kinda ended up just swindling me out of it, and was doing the couch tour at the time, so had nowhere to put it.

There are only three real "classic" sound types or "tones" when you are talking about combo organs, or combo keyboards...there's the original Hammond "tone wheel" sound, especially through a Leslie speaker, which really is a jazz sound, but made the switch into rock early on and easily. (Listen to "Green Onions", of course, and "Good Lovin'" by the Rascals!) There's the VOX sound, in its purest form exhibited by the original Continental, as on most of the Dave Clark Five's stuff, especially "Because", and the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun". "96 Tears" is also a Connie. There's the Farfisa sound, as on "Double Shot of My Baby's Love" and a jillion other cheese-rock songs.

There are some other distinctive tones peculiar to a few songs or known mostly for what one player or band did with them, like Ray Manzarek's Gibson/Kalamazoo G101 (actually a Lowrey-built item), or Gary Lewis' "This Diamond Ring" and the New Colony Six' "I Confess", both of which used a Cordovox, which was an accordion with a Lowrey organ built into it. Yeah, it was quite heavy.

Tone Wheel tales: The most desirable tonewheel Hammonds were the mighty and classic B3s, which continue to rule the jazz roost. These days there are emulators that come close to its distinctive sound, but the original "B" still dominates.

The story of the tonewheel concept is an interesting one. It's inventor, Laurentz Hammond, was the guy who invented the multi-pole "synchronous hysteresis" clock motor--the first electric motor with a constant and accurate enough speed to be used in electric clocks. After he built some record turntables that used them, eliminating the hand-crank of the old Victrolas, with their patented constant-tension spring mechanisms (ingenious in their own right!), he gave some thought to using the motors to produce musical tones. He built a tone generator that used an electromagnetic coil with a toothed disc rotating near the magnetic pole at one end. This generated a constant-tone signal by induction, which could be "tuned" to a musical note by rotating at a specific speed and varying the number of teeth on the wheel (which is slightly more than 1" in diameter). Gang up a bunch of toothed wheels on a common shaft, rotated by this terrific constant-speed motor, each with a different number of teeth around its circumference, and each with its own dedicated coil feeding into an amplifier, with sounds modified by simple resistor/capacitor circuitry for different sound characteristics, activate with a piano-type keyboard, and you have an electro-mechanical musical device.

As you can imagine, once refined and complexified, all his hardware weighed a lot, but its sound was incomparable and the tonewheel Hammonds, though out of production since the late 1970s, did have a 4-decade-plus hold on the market.

The Hammond Organ Company was located on W. Diversey Avenue in Chicago, less than a mile from my house in the 1960s. I remember walking past the red brick, single-story factory, which was built right up to the sidewalk and had tilt-out windows. I could poke my head under the tilt-out section and watch the organs being assembled and tested. Fascinating stuff for a pre-teen kid.

On Saturday mornings through much of 1962, accompanied by a grade-school buddy, Barney, I would take the "El" from the Belmont Avenue station down to the end of the line in Jackson Park, at 63rd and Stony Island, and walk a mile north in the Park to the Museum of Science and Industry to hear a weekly science lecture given by Dr. Dan Q. Posin, a physics prof at DePaul University. The museum opened its doors at 8 a.m. on Saturdays back then, and the lectures began at 9 sharp, so Barney and I would make a beeline for the museum cafeteria, bolt down a good breakfast, and have a half to three-quarters of an hour to wander the corridors and displays of a deserted museum.

I recall that, at the time, Hammond sponsored a large display with the theme of creating music through electronics--very heady stuff for the time. The centerpiece of this display was a Plexiglas-cased M3, with its ingenious mechanisms proudly on display. There was also a rotunda of glass-walled demonstration booths, each having a glass bifold door like an old Superman phone booth. Inside each booth was, not an M-3 or even an M-100, but an S-6 Hammond chord organ, with its complement of 96 buttons arranged for the left hand, and a three-octave keyboard for the right. Sound selection was by typical Hammond tilt-tabs (as earlier featured in the monophonic Solovox, which I later played in a band), and there was a switchable bass octave with its own voices. I recall three volume control knobs on the fascia and a knee lever for master volume. All told, I probably spent twenty hours that year, in half-hour bites, playing this unique electronic instrument. This was not a tonewheel Hammond, but a polyphonic keyboard with its tones generated by tubes (as was the Cordovox!). I recall seeing the Beach Boys performing "Wendy" from their 1964 "All Summer Long" album, with the S-6 providing the organ bridge. It predated the VOX or any other portable organ, and although it was a home-type spinet with a mahogany veneer finish and upright-piano looks, it was light enough, at 140 pounds (my estimate, after lifting and moving one) , and sturdy enough, to go on tour.

The sound of this early tube-driven synthesizer must of imprinted me like a baby duck, as I have always wanted one. Bandmate George found me one on craigslist in Oakland and last Sunday found me paying a small amount and picking one up. It had the look, sound, and smell that I remember from all those years back!
The other display that I enjoyed--particularly on muggy Chicago mornings, was the GM display, part of which showed how an automotive air conditioning system worked. You could dial in a temperature and stand in front of a '62 Cadillac dashboard with the A/C vents blowing on your face. Aaaahhhh...to this day, whenever I turn on the A/C in one of my cars and feel the cool breeze, my nose taking in the cool, dry scent of the processed air, the smell is the same nostalgic ticket to the Summer of '62.

Wow! Deja-vuski! My first bass amp was the bass version of that little Baldwin. It had a twelve and a fiteen and those colorful buttons on top - including the all-important "Timbre" button. As a high-school kid, proper comical references were made every time the timbre button was pushed. The damned thing was constantly blowing speakers and the dealer kept installing bigger and bigger watchdog lightbulbs inside to try to bleed off power before it got to the speakers when the volume spiked. In a dark room, the thing probably glowed when you would play loud. They finally gave up and gave me a refund but I always kind of liked the modern, clean look of the thing. They later came out with their big amp "The Baldwin Exterminator" which I always thought was really great name for a rock and roll amplifier.

I'm not really a keyboard player at all, but do own an old Alesis QS7 synthesizer that I mess with. Mostly I make space noises and whale songs, but I did figure out that siren at the beginning of "Riding The Storm Out". I'm waiting for a good stormy day with tornado watches, when I will stuck the amp in the window, crank it up and see if I can panic the entire neighborhood.

I'm not really a keyboard player either but I have a Roland RS-50 and Korg Triton LE61 that I fool around with..... good fun and they sound pretty cool through my Roland KC-350 amp with accompanying sub-woofer.

Cool thread!

I'm Smitten.

I have a 60's Hammond tonewheel L100 and a mighty 100w Leslie 910. When I turn it up you can hear it all the way to Subiaco Oval a mile away! Both the Hammond and Leslie are in mint condition. I absolutely love them.
I also have a Korg Poly800 which is heading toward being "vintage".
Also on the list but not vintage a Yammy electric piano.
Next I want a Farfisa organ to round out my early Pink Floyd sound.....

Although I'm not a keyboard player, I owned several vintage keyboards up until last year. I had a '67 Vox Jaguar, a '68 Vox Jaguar and a near mint '68 Vox Super Continental. The Super was the dual keyboard version. Although I had always planned to learn how to play them, I decided to sell my Thomas Organ/Vox solid-state amp collection and threw the organs in with the deal.

I, too, know nothing about organs, but those old ones are great!

Got any Vox organ pictures, Paul?