HammondX66 Fan WebSite

MY VERSION AND APPRECIATION ABOUT THE HAMMOND ORGAN HISTORY AND ANOTHER BRANDS

In any situation of life is good to see the past to learn from the succeses and failiures and to try to do correct the failiures.

The purpose of this page is to give my version of what I lived of the organ music since 1974 to date, giving my impression as potential customer, and telling what I belive the organ companies did right and what they could do better.

Hammond made many organ models. The B3 is actually the best known, the most sold and the one who is more valuated. However, I think that many of the organs that Hammond made, were exactly as excelents as the B3, only that their sound didn’t got to the general public, and this is a sad thing because to my personal opinion, the best organ sound (not rythm sounds or accomp or sampled sounds) is Hammons sound.

I think that not enought people learned how to play Hammond organs, and I think this labor should have been done by the manufacturer in those years.

I think that if famous organists had been recognized in public by the organ companies, organists that for example had recorded and sold many copies of their material, or that had promoted amateur contests or promoted several organ recordings, the Hammond sound would have reached more people, and more people would have played organ.

Companies like Yamaha colaborated to maintain the taste of playing organ with their contests for kids, and I APPLAUDE them with Uppercase Letters.

The adding of rythms and automatic accompainment to the organs made the competition for organ companies tougher. The potential customer had the choice, and he wanted the brand that was easy to play, and had the best sound, leaving the original organ sound to a corner (this is the Hammond sound).

From the organs with rythms and accompainments the portable synthetizers were born.

The birth of the portable home synthetizer with automatic accompainments and rythms was a very hard hit to the electronic organ industry because most of the people began to buy the synths over the organs due to their price, functions and portability.

However, today exists a confusion between what is an organ and a synthetizer and unfortunally they are been compared, when both should not be compared due that they are different instruments (as you compare a guitar with a bass guitar).

And the problem is that nobody never nor demostrated us that the synthetizer and the organ are different instruments, and both require a different tecnique of playing them.

The electronic organ is the father of the synthetizer because from the electronic organ the synthetizer was born, forgetting its origin that is the true Hammond sound.