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Hammond Organ for a fiver?


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They go for little to nothing. A pal has a couple that he's advertised at silly prices with no interest. He even tried "free if you take it away" with no luck. They're great, but you can get 95% of the sound from something that fits in your pocket.

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3 hours ago, Dan Dare said:

They go for little to nothing. A pal has a couple that he's advertised at silly prices with no interest. He even tried "free if you take it away" with no luck. They're great, but you can get 95% of the sound from something that fits in your pocket.

 

Yeah I had a mate who did house clearances, could get them for free. Helped him carry one up some stairs once when he did manage to get twenty quid for one of them, not offering to do that again.

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The value of Hammond organs varies by several orders of magnitude depending on the model. The one in the original post is a later fully electronic spinet organ - you might get £20 for one if you're lucky. The M3/M100/L100 spinet organs, which are in the same form factor but have a mechanical tone generator and valve electronics, go for a few hundred depending on condition and features. The T100 - mechanical tone generator but transistor electronics - is also worth looking at but you don't see many of them in the UK. The full-sized, full-featured A100/B3/C3 are worth a couple of thousand, more in good condition - bearing in mind that even the newest ones are 50+ years old now.

 

That said, a lot of what people think of as the Hammond sound really comes from the Leslie's distortion and modulation, and even a cheap electronic organ sounds pretty convincing through a Leslie or a decent Leslie simulator... I went from an L100 + Leslie 2101 to a C3 + Leslie 122XB, and the latter is definitely better but it's not ten times better.

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3 hours ago, Woody1957 said:

I know nothing about organs so which one did Jon Lord play in DP?

 

Hammond C3 organ sound

Lord's strict reliance on the Hammond C3 organ sound, as opposed to the synthesizer experimentation of his contemporaries, places him firmly in the jazz-blues category as a band musician and far from the progressive-rock sound of Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman.

 

That Wikipaedia thingy is quite helpful ...

 

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My best mate Ben was the Hammond player in my band many moons ago. There was a rival band at the time whose keyboard player Tim also had a Hammond, albeit a smaller model. I asked Ben what the difference was between them, and he explained that when Rick Wakeman was touring with Yes, he had one of each as part of his stage setup:

 

"He used the one like mine for playing the songs, and the one like Tim's for sticking big knives into."

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I see a lot of for sale ads offering organs for free - the type your nan would have in the 70s and 80s to try and play some Klaus Wunderlich medleys on. 

 

I also see a lot of these type of organs that were made by Hammond (but without drawbars) listed at silly prices in the hope someone will be fooled by the name and pay out hoping they will be the next Jimmy Smith on it....

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