How the Hammond Organ works
With
Joe GlossopJoe Glossop opens up the Hammond's tonewheel generator, showing how its 96 spinning wheels and nine drawbars per key recreate the pipe lengths of a church organ.
What's in the course
24 lessons (2h 18m) · 1 free
01. The Funk Brothers - How Sweet It Is (performance - keyboard view)
1:42
02. The Funk Brothers - How Sweet It Is
8:51
03. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On (performance - keyboard view)
1:54
04. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
8:49
05. Carole King - You've Got A Friend (performance - keyboard view)
1:51
06. Carole King - You've Got A Friend
8:22
Lesson transcript
Understanding the Tone Wheel Generator
The guts of it are this tone wheel generator that has 96 tone wheels on a rod, and they spin in an electric current.
How It Works
- Each time the little cog cuts through the current, a tone is produced.
- Each key has nine contacts which correspond to nine drawbars.
- As you press the key down, you gradually hear a transition from high to low.
- The contacts engage one by one.
Key Mechanics
- In each key, there are nine contacts going up and down vertically.
- It's a very complicated system.
- I don't know how he came up with it, and it's amazing that they still work all this time later.
Historical Context
- The design is 70 to 80 years old.
- It's different from a church organ in that it's electric, to begin with.
Drawbar Modeling
- These drawbars are modeled on lengths of pipe from a church organ.
- The original idea was to recreate a church organ.
Drawbar Labels
-
If you see slightly later models from the late 60s onwards through the 70s, the drawbars had the lengths of pipe written on:
- This is 16
- This is 5 and a third
- This is 8
- This is 4
- That's 2 and 1
-
Additional notes:
- These are all kind of one and a third, two and three fifths.
- I think these are sub fundamentals.
- The white ones are all fundamentals.
- That's a fifth, and these are all fifths.
Conclusion
It's an incredible bit of engineering, really. This model was made from 1955 to 1975.
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Meet your guru
Meet your guru
Joe Glossop is a keyboard player from Sheffield who has made his name on the Hammond organ. He currently holds the organ chair in Tom Jones's touring band, and has played with Van Morrison and James Hunter, as well as on piano and Rhodes. His courses get the real Hammond sound out of any keyboard - drawbar registration, the Leslie, the walking-bass left hand, and the comping and soloing vocabulary of the soul-jazz, blues and rock organ traditions, from Jimmy Smith to Booker T.
