John Tweed

“I started out with nothing and I still have most of it left”

Very interesting listening. I really enjoyed the first piece, not so much the second. How does the organ play those notes outside of equal temperament? I’m totally in the equal temperament world, where lead instruments generally have artistic freedom to bend notes (eg blues). Other instruments within the ensemble don’t have that same freedom, otherwise we (all/some) would perceive things to be out of tune. Of course with 12 notes per octave and equal temperament everything is a little bit out of tune anyway. My understanding of 19 notes per octave, 31 notes etc is to be more in tune, or more consonant. Would I notice if the first piece was played with 12 note equal temperament? Probably not. However in the second piece the harmony is not always consonant - some chords sound bad to me. Is that a result of the tuning being used or deliberate dissonance? An interesting experiment I carried out some time back with a lap steel. Placing the bar across three strings at an angle between two “frets”, the note on the string in the middle is a quarter tone (or thereabouts), but can often sound surprisingly consonant with the outside notes. But what are these “chords” I am hearing? This shows me that there is a world of harmony out there that I am never going to access with my keyboards and guitars. On the other hand I recall reading somewhere that the Hammond tonewheels are only approximately in tune, due to physical limitations, but this is part of the sound that many of us love.

What about a Yamaha CK61 (or 88) which has plenty of its own sounds but which you can easily integrate an iPad or computer for better organ or other sounds. It’s very light and the onboard sounds are surprisingly good, as long as you don’t want to extensively edit things.

The improved action looks pretty good though. I have too many bad memories of trying to make my Fender Rhodes 88 playable to get excited enough to buy one.

I’ve got the vinyl if anyone wants it - just pm me. I have no record player anymore and plan to get rid of all my records.

I have experimented with something similar in order to be able to use stereo (piano) samples in mono. Image you are at your slab piano with speakers, so your ears are equidistant from the speakers. Using a stereo piano sound play middle C - sounds nice. Now you move to the right hand end of the piano, head down, so the left speaker is directly aligned with the right, and you play the note again - still sounds good. Now the speakers are no longer equidistant, but they are coming from the same direction. Now you take the right channel directly into a mono system, apply a short delay (approx. 3ms to roughly equal the distance between the speakers) to the left signal, and then merge them. Now you are hearing a mono signal that sounds as good as the “mono” you simulated by positioning yourself with the speakers in alignment. I did manage to set up my CP4 in this way - it worked, at least it gave rise to some interesting sounds as the delay was changed. It did not end up being something that I used as the CP4 has plenty of mono pianos already. I have been meaning to go back and experiment a bit more with it, in readiness for the next piano stereo to mono thread.

I have only one synth now - a Behringer 2600 - because I wanted to experience some of what Joe Zawinul and Stevie Wonder did when they discovered these instruments back in the day. Every so often I play around with plugging patch cables in and seeing what come out. Other than that I have no interest in synths anymore, only piano, ep and organ. My CK61 comes close enough for any synth sounds I might need to pull up at a gig.

Not sure if James Carter featuring Gerard Gibbs on organ has had a mention. It’s a sax, organ and drums combo. There’s a lifetime of organ music here. Don’t forget to listen to other stuff too. Charlie Hunter is listed above. Saw him in an interview where he mentioned being inspired by organists playing left hand bass and melody or comping in the right. I only discovered him when he recently visited Australia with Kurt Elling who is my favourite vocalist.

Please let’s not have this thread end up in Craig’s forum. I enjoy most of RB’s interviews. If not, I just move onto something else. I’m only part way thru the BJ interview, but I intend to go back for more. My comments may be clouded by the fact that if BJ was appearing in my town, I’d be happy for all his fans, but if it was MM I’d be in the front row.

What a voice! Nice Rhodes too. Who wouldn’t love to wake up one day and be able to sing like that? He came across to me as humble, human, a genuine nice guy. No,the interviewer didn’t ask every question we could come up with here. That’s not the idea of the interview. If anyone can point me to their analysis of their own music (or anybody’s for that matter) written by Mozart, Beethoven or Bach, I’d love to see it. No, you can’t, because they were too busy just writing the music in the first place.

Organ starts at 1:50. I think it could be a single rotor?

I ‘ve attempted to match my various clones with my 251. The fast speed on the 251 is still marginally too fast for me. I love the Leslie sound on this Medeski Martin & Wood track which is possibly not a 147 or 122 but another model of Leslie. Maybe the experts here could weigh in. https://youtu.be/kfYBk1EPbDI?si=064h1j_XqYg-zibV Probably not a sound I’d use all night, but the Vent gives easy access to the speed and can go slow. I don’t use the Vent much these days due to being quite happy with the overall sound I get from Legend Live and the advantage of keeping things simple.

I’m going to disagree here - I have used the transpose feature quite often. There is one blues band I play with occasionally who play 95% of their repertoire in E or A. I am fully conversant with guitar keys, they are easy for me. But it gets a bit boring after a while, so I transpose up or down to make it more interesting - so I’m playing in Eb or F, Ab or Bb. Eb I quite like, but for some reason I find Ab a bit more challenging for blues. At the last gig where I did this the band leader told me it was the best I’d ever played with them. Also I’m getting practice in case I ever play an untransposable instrument with a band that tunes down. What was the topic anyway?

Dazz I defer to your extensive experience with organs. In an effort to quantify things I checked out the four 61 note boards I have at my disposal. Without going into specifics, I can say that the Legend Live is the lightest, followed by my Triton LE (old but it has aftertouch) then the Hammond SK1 (12 years old). In last place was the Yamaha CK61 (with a pseudo hammer action). So the CK61 is not lighter than the VLL, as I claimed somewhere previously. In my defence I made that claim while not near either of the boards, and possibly was unconsciously comparing it to weighted boards. Some of the other results surprised me, for example I would have said the SK1 was lighter than the Live, but it is not so. Perhaps that’s because I have generally used it over the top of a CP4 and so it will certainly feel lighter than that. After 12 years and many gigs it must surely be well played in. (I have retired it from gigging as it sometimes doesn’t want to fire up, otherwise it rates as one of the best boards I have ever owned). With each board I briefly tried to determine how much variation there is between keys due to some enduring more use than others. Doing this properly would require a lot more time and equipment than I have at my disposal just now. I found that, yes, there is some evidence that some notes may well be lighter than others but they are only slightly so. It’s not anywhere within the range of another board. I haven’t detailed my methodology nor translated the measurements into weights. Briefly I am using small coins to lay weights on the keys. I plan to continue with my experiments and will make the methodology and all the results available at some point in the future. Hopefully some others of you will be encouraged to measure your instrument so we can make broad comparisons. Three boards I am interested to know about are the Mojo, the original two manual with the light keyboard (I used to have one of these), the new Vox Continental (I’ve never played one but I did run my hand over the keys once in a music shop while it wasn’t on and it felt incredibly light) and a Mag. The VLL is the lightest board I have here, but it’s not the lightest I have ever had so I am keenly waiting on my Soul61 (it’s on its way) and you can be sure I’ll be comparing the two - the Live will not be leaving for its new home until I have had a chance to compare them.

Sorry to disagree with you dazz, but as you know I have had two Lives for about two years each, and neither of them loosened up in any way noticeable to me. Think about it - the keys in the middle of the keyboard get much more use than at the ends, but I have yet to hear of anyone noticing any differences from one end of the keyboard to the other. My playing is mostly standard jazz organ style where the lower manual gets a lot of use at the left hand end, but it still feels exactly the same as the left hand end of the upper manual.

Certainly being in a room next to the Leslie is a totally different experience to listening to it thru any kind of sound reinforcement system. I recall seeing Rocky Petersen with David Sanborn about 25 years ago at a venue in Laguna Beach - kind of an outdoor ampitheatre. The Leslie was set up in the field adjacent to the stage, about 50 yards away, stacked on boxes and festooned with microphones. The only thing Ricky would have heard is what was coming thru the pa. Similarly there are setups where the Leslie is in a box somewhere, or off stage. I believe it has been reported that Chuck Leavell uses a Vent with the Rolling Stones. In our little test we weren’t comparing the Leslie with the sims, rather it was just to remind ourselves what we were trying to achieve. As I recall the difference in the Vent and the Lester was one of them had more “air” around it. Perhaps it is possible to tweak one of them to get closer to the other, but as I remarked before, they both sounded good in their own way.

Once upon a time when I worked as a computer consultant I tried to email a report which contained the phrase “Cumulative Total”! I’m sure you will immediately see why it disallowed that.

I play my Live thru a Leslie 251/147 at home, and use the sim in mono on gigs. I’ve got an original vent which I used with my Hammond SK1, mainly because the slowest fast speed on the SK1 was too fast. Nowadays on gigs I am using a Yamaha CK61. I use its internal organ and sim at rehearsals, VB3M on my phone at live gigs, and IK B3x on the iPad for recording, where it has the edge in tweakability. Last year a friend came over to check out the Vent and compare it with the Lester to see if the Vent or Lester was worth buying to use with his Kronos. We tried everything out: Leslie 251, Legend sim, Lester and Vent. My opinion: no surprises, you can’t beat the real thing. After that the Vent by a nose over the sim, then the Lester. The Vent and Lester both sounded good, but different, so I think he went ahead with the Lester as any improvement going to the Vent was not worth the higher cost. For me the Vent integrates better with the SK1 as it can be controlled via midi, and I had the appropriate cable wired up to achieve this. I hate stomp box switches - I often play at home in bare feet and I find it distracting. Instead I use a normal Yamaha momentary switch to flip speeds.

I was thinking about doing this with my Live. Not having another set of springs to swap, I considered trying to order some. But I don’t know exactly what to order, or where from. In the end it would have been considerable effort and who knows if I would be happy with the end result. Solved the problem by ordering a Soul261. I’m selling the Live to a friend who has not played much organ, concentrating on piano and synth. He had been over a few times to play and loves it, and jumped at the chance to buy it off me. We will both end up very happy.

I’m glad to hear the action is light. If it fits I’m planning to keep my Live bag which I got 4 years ago. The dimensions are almost identical, only the height is one centimetre (4/10 of an inch) bigger. I figure there is a good chance the old bag will contain it. Has anyone had a chance to try it out?

I generally agree, but multiple parallel threads are not uncommon here (eg M-Solo). Some threads wander too far off topic - for example the recent Yamaha CK thread turned into pages and pages of comparison between it and the Vox Continental. That should have been a separate thread entirely and labelled as such. On the other hand I’ve seen posters dinged for reviving a “zombie” thread when they “should” have started a new one. Then there’s the parody (on parody) threads which just pollute the namespace and the ones that go on forever. It was my intention to post in the main Soul thread, then this one popped up. The original thread is nearly two years old, started when the Soul was first announced. It contains a lot of speculation early on, morphing into actual info and then (mostly) positive opinions. The op in this thread started it from a position of enthusiasm for the product, which is where I am at now while I wait for mine to arrive.

Congratulations! My order for a Soul 261 is in. This will replace my Live. I’ve been very happy with the Live, although there were a couple of things that let it down. Prior to the Live I had a Mojo, the first dual manual model with the lightly sprung keyboard. For me the Live sounded so much better than the Mojo that I was prepared to sacrifice the nice keyboard. I recently bought a Yammy CK61 and the keyboard on that feels better than the Live, even thought the CK has a pseudo, very light hammer action (I’m not around either board at the moment, otherwise I’d try and come up with a better comparison). Secondly I never really bonded with the blonde colour. Weird as I have had blonde guitars and guitar amps in the past (and still have) which I liked the look of. This is trivial, I know, but I have a Leslie 251 and the colours don’t match. If there was a reliable way to modify the Live keyboard then I would most likely do that, but it’s not something I’d want to be fiddling with - could spend money and then still not be happy with the result. All the other enhancements on the Soul will be a bonus. I continue to be impressed by how Viscount provides so much connectivity and other features in their offerings, whereas many manufacturers only provide what the ‘average’ player wants and leaves out features that would be really useful to the more ambitious.

Is there any way to hide a complete thread on this site? If there were then when a thread goes south like this it could be ignored completely. Alternatively perhaps those folks who want to spend a long time denigrating someone would find it a better use of their time finding some youtube videos that they do approve of, and watching them. There seems to be people who are jealous of someone who has found a way to continue a music career in this day and age. When I started playing in bands almost 60 years ago musos had many opportunities to play and get paid well for it. Nowadays not so much. I believe if you can’t say something nice then don’t say anything at all. I’m breaking my rule a bit in this case, because watching a thread turn toxic like this is like watching the proverbial slow motion car crash - hard to take your eyes off. However if there was a way to hide the complete thread it would be much easier to ignore. Moderators what say you?

i don’t think there is much you can fiddle with in the organ dept. but you can easily connect an iPhone or iPad and use one of the many apps, such as VB3 or B3X. For recording this is the way to go. Live the inbuilt organ works pretty well, as long as you are not doing a Jimmy Smith tribute. I’ve used VB3 (on my phone) if I need better sound live - I always have it with me, and it can balance on the end of the keyboard in a pinch (CK61). I have not used B3X live much so far as there is nowhere to conveniently put it. For my money the built in organ sound is much better than what I would expect, given many of the comments here and elsewhere. When I first got it I tried out all three organs at a gig and while the band members agreed that B3X was the best, no-one complained when I used the Yammy emulation . Up until that point I had been using an SK1 thru a Vent. Sadly the SK1 has become a bit temperamental (had it for 12 years, a pretty good run if you ask me), and won’t always turn on.

All this info about the Vox is very interesting, but I thought the topic here is the Yamaha CK series itself. If I was looking for info on the Vox why would I look at a topic clearly marked Yamaha?