Organ Morgan

[tommymack.livejournal.com]

Why do so many garage bands feature a Hammond organ (or similar, pedantry fans...)? Surely it would have been a prohibatively expensive and cumbersome instrument for 60s teenagers with cheapo Danelectro guitars made out of plastic?

Comments

AN OLD PEDANT STEPS UP

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think the selling point of hammonds (and similar, tho if memory serves the device which made them sound so hammondy was patented by the hammond company) was that they were both affordable and portable

certainly no less so than decent backline marshall amps; more so than than an upright piano

[infov0re.livejournal.com]

Well, not all Hammonds are as unportable as a C3. There are various more moveable ones (A series, I think).

Also: not all organs are Hammonds. The Vox and Farfisa organs were also really popular back in the day (cf: House of the Rising Sun) because they were way cheaper. They're also way more portable (like this Vox (http://www.midtownmusic.com/images/voxjag.jpg)).

And they were often floating around, I guses - if your parents or local church owned one, made sense to use it.

Re: AN OLD PEDANT STEPS UP

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"So simple and practical was this new Hammond that a whole market area opened up. With its simplicity and attractive price of only $975, many households began to weigh a Hammond Organ against a piano. It was meant to he played for fun and not as an instrument for producing trained organists."

from a hammond fan-site -- affordability is obv relative there (i think the marshall amps would not be that pricey, though the larger louder models were still basically custom-built till the late 60s) but if the choice was keyb or NO keyb than hammond was the best bet

(seems likely also that many wd be available in good condition second-hand)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

could you play chords on a farfisa or a vox? the online hammond histories make a lot of that distinction

(bah i used to know all this stuff really well and it has turned to mush in my brain)

[tommymack.livejournal.com]

I think so. I believe The Doors used a Vox Continental on Light My Fire.

Christ I'm ashamed of knowing that.

[infov0re.livejournal.com]

Yeah, should be able to. A proper organ (as opposed to a synthesizer) should have a tone-generator for each note. Maybe they had limited polyphony, not sure. There are definitely chords from the Vox on Rising Sun, for sure.

[koganbot]

Red Dark Sweet used a Vox. And yes, played chords (though this was a decade and a half after "96 Tears"). I think "96 Tears" made the Farfisa famous. But I haven't done the research, and am too busy to go to Wiki and find out.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

using hammond-fan sites is probably a guarantee of partisan unreliability -- i will have to go back and look at all my notes i think, before i talk more nonsense

i half remember that one of the famous ones came into a top half and a bottom half for ease of portability

and the leslie speakers spin round to give the warble

and if you stick knives in a hammond you are keith emerson

[(Anonymous)]

This (www.combo-organ.com/discography.htm) seems a decent place to start. It seems like 96 Tears is the source of endless dispute...