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Synthesizers have added a profoundly unique timbre to American and global popular music since the 1930’s and for the first 30-40 years of these instruments making their mark, the sound was the additive tonewheel synthesis pioneered by Thaddeus Cahill’s 1896 invention the Telharmonium. Cahill was too far ahead of his time and the gigantic instrument he built failed mainly because the technological limitations of the early 20th century, so it would take another four decades before the principles behind his invention were incorporated into the brilliant design of Laurens Hammond’s organ.
Like Cahill, Laurens Hammond was a prolific inventor who was not a musician himself. He was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1895 and shortly after his father’s death in 1897, his mother, an artist, took him to Europe where he was raised until high school. By the time he was 14, Hammond was already inventing gadgets and his mother encouraged him to begin patenting them. He received his first patent at the age of 17 for a barometer and he would go on to patent 91 different inventions.
After graduating Cornell University in 1916, Hammond served with U.S. Army in France during World War I and upon returning from the war in 1919, he began throwing himself into his inventing career. After creating one of the first successful systems for showing 3D movies in theaters, Hammond focused on electric clocks. Electric clocks were a new and incredibly practical invention in the early 20th century. Previously clocks had required physical winding which wasn’t the case with electric clocks, however, the problem was that in the 1920’s and 30’s, the voltage that came out of outlets was often unstable, causing clocks to speed up or slow down. Hammond solved this problem with a motor that ran at the same speed no matter the voltage, thereby keeping accurate time. These clocks proved successful and his Hammond Clock Company thrived until the Great Depression hit in 1929.
Hammond’s organ came about as a way to keep himself solvent during the worst years of the Depression. In order to save his clock company, Hammond first developed a bridge table that automatically shuffled cards. Realizing that he needed another idea, he turned to the idea of an organ powered by one of his clock motors. His associate George Stephens suggested a design based on Cahill’s Telharmonium but with miniature tonewheels. The way the Hammond Organ works is that when an organist presses a key on the keyboard, it activates a tonewheel, a small rotating metal disc which produce different pitches based on the size of the wheel and its teeth. As he wheels spin, they pass by electromagnetic pick ups and these pickups convert the vibration of the tonewheels into electronic signals that create perfect sine waves. Part of the classic Hammond sound is something known as ‘tonewheel leakage’ in which the pickups ‘hear’ tonewheels besides their own.
Key to the sound of the Hammond Organ are the drawbars which are the heart of the additive synthesis engine of the instrument. Each bar has a number from 1 – 8 which signifies the volume of each of the sine waves that are produced by each draw bar, in a very similar fashion to a mixer.
Each drawbar on a Hammond Organ represents a sine wave pitch based on the stop system of an organ. Traditional organs were based on Pythagorean Intervals, which were known to the ancient Greeks over 2500 years ago. The idea is that when a string on a lyre was divided exactly into two parts, the resulting pitch would be an octave higher. A string exactly 2/3 the length of another will create a Perfect Fifth and one 3/4 of another string creates a Perfect Fourth. In pipe organs, this system was applied to the length of pipes, so 8′ or the 8 foot pipe was the fundamental tone, 16′ or 16 feet was an octave below the fundamental, 4′ or four feet was and octave above the fundamental, 2′ or two feet was two octaves above the fundamental and 1′ or one foot was three octaves above the fundamental. On a Hammond Organ, all of the white drawbars represent octaves above the fundamental. The first brown drawbar represents 16′ which is an octave below the fundamental. The second brown drawbar represents 5 1/3′ which is 2/3 or 8′ making that drawbar a perfect fifth above the fundamental. The first black drawbar from the left is 2/3 of ‘4 making that an octave and perfect fifth above the fundamental, The second black drawbar is also an overtone representing two octaves and a major third above the fundamental. Finally, the third black drawbar is an overtone representing two octaves and a perfect fifth above the fundamental.
The chart above shows the Hammond Organ drawbars from left to right. One very important thing to understand is what the Harmonic Number represents on the chart. Timbre is a combination of many simple sine waves or partials each with its own vibration, amplitude and phase. These numbers represent the positive integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. In the chart below we can see them spelled out in Western musical notation:
The Hammond Organ was successful even before it went into production. One of the first orders came from Henry Ford who offered to finance Hammond and another one was bought by George Gershwin. It was quickly adopted by film and pop stars of the 1940’s, most notably Ethel Smith who became one of the most important popularizers of the instrument.
It was the music of the Black church, however, where the virtuosic playing style would emerge from and profoundly influence jazz and rock music after the Second World War. The adoption of the Hammond Organ into the musical culture of the Black church began first in Chicago where the original Hammond factory was located. Reverend Clarence Cobbs of the First Church of Deliverance , was convinced by composer Kenneth Morris in 1939 to install one in the church to accompany the choir. The Reverend Cobbs had a popular radio broadcast on Chicago’s WSBC and the sound of the Hammond Organ with the choir led other Black churches to adopt the instrument. Hearing the Hammond Organ in a church setting led pianists Wild Bill Davis and Fats Waller to adopt it and these musicians influenced the great Jimmy Smith who would popularize it in jazz, soul and rock music.
The powerful sound of the Hammond Organ is based on its three keyboards and the upper two keyboards have their own sets of nine stops so that each can be a different timbre. The foot pedals of the Hammond are a powerful bass machine and they are laid out as a piano keyboard as well. The foot pedals only get two stops which are found in the center between the nine stops of the upper keyboards. These stops are one and two octaves below the fundamental, technically 16′ and 32′.
There is one other critical element to the sound of a classic Hammond Organ – the Leslie Speaker. The classic amplifier of the Hammond Organ was invented in 1941 by Donald Leslie a radio service engineer in L.A. who loved the sound of pipe organs which he heard of radio and theaters. In 1937, he bought a used Hammond Organ, while working at a store that sold them. He couldn’t afford a speaker, so he brought it home and hooked it up to speakers that he had built and was disappointed by the sound quality of the instrument. Since he had bought the Hammond, he began to experiment with ways to get the organ to sound better. After a series of experiment, he realized that a speaker in motion utilizing the Doppler effect could replicate the sound of a pipe organ in a large space. He developed a speaker that split the signal of the Hammond Organ into different frequency bands. The treble and bass speakers rotate at variable speeds with the treble horn rotating more quickly. This speaker made the Hammond Organ sound big and lush and the combination makes up the classic Hammond sound.
Don Leslie took his invention to Laurens Hammond, expecting that he would be excited by it, but Hammond, who wanted a more traditional church pipe organ sound hated the Leslie’s speaker and prohibited Hammond Organ dealers from selling or even mentioning the Leslie. Don Leslie went into business selling the speaker himself and though they had to be purchased separately, they were seen as an essential combination for musicians. He tried to sell the company to Laurens Hammond again in 1958 and eventually sold the company Suzuki Music of Japan who still manufactures these unique speakers.
The glory years of the Hammond organ were the late 50’s and 1960’s. In 1954, Hammond introduced his most famous version of his instrument, the Hammond B-3. The B-3 was adopted heavily by gospel musicians and the players of Black church took the instrument to new levels of virtuosity. In 1956, Blue Note records signed the virtuoso organist Jimmy Smith who went on to record a series of successful soul/jazz records in the late 50’s and early 60’s and profoundly influencing the jazz and soul players who followed including Booker T. Jones. Booker T, as he was often called, recorded his hit ‘Green Onions’ in 1962, while still in high school, with his band Booker T. and the M.G.’s – a group that contained the legendary Stax Records rhythm section. These musicians went onto play on some of the most legendary soul classics of the 1960’s including records by Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes and Sam & Dave and in the process making the Hammond B-3 organ an integral sound in soul music as well as rock n roll. Sly Stone introduced the Hammond into funk – after all he had begun his musical career as the organist in his church.
By the mid 1970’s the sound of the Hammond organ had gone out of style. The new Moog and ARP 2600 subtractive synths seemed the wave of the future and the B-3 had become associated with lounge acts and the music of an older generation. The last Hammond B-3 was built in 1975 and approximately a decade afterwards, the Hammond disappeared from pop music. The instrument, however, was reborn in 1991 when Suzuki Music purchased the brand on behalf of its owner, Manji Suzuki who was a diehard fan of organ jazz. Suzuki released a new instrument with digital components, the Hammond XB-2 and by the early 2000’s it had been adopted by a new generation of organists like Larry Goldings, Barbara Dennerlein, Joey DeFrancesco and groups like Medeski, Martin & Wood and Soulive. Almost a century after its creation and 130 years since Thaddeus Cahill developed the tonewheel technology that powers the instrument, the sound of the Hammond Organ, especially the B-3, can be found in countless sample packs, synth emulations and as presets on hardware synths of various types.
Dan Freeman is a producer, bassist and music technologist based in New York City. He is currently an Associate Arts Professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music where he specializes in synthesis and sound design. He is also on the faculty of The Juilliard School’s Center for Creative Technologies. He produces from his production suite in New York City Studios north of Union Square and is the Director/Founder of the Brooklyn Digital Conservatory.