Speaking of Hammond's birthday,
My Hammond would be close to 70 years old now. It was a Model D manufactured between 1939 and 1942.
It sounded "meaner" than any B3 and (as I recall) had less "fold over" than the B3.
I traded an M3 and a Wurlitzer electric piano for it straight across and it included a Leslie 122RV (this was in ~1969).
I later picked up a "combo pedal" with a Leslie 147RV so I could put my other keyboards though the Leslie also.
Because the 122 and 147 differ internally and the 122 cannot be driven by the combo pedal, I opened up the 122 and using the 147 as a guide, made the 122 into a 147 by removing some parts and rewiring others (one of my first electronic projects). This worked out perfectly.
When the organ was transported from Las Vegas to LA, my friend who was delivering it hit the inspection station with his van totalling the case and damaging the Leslies.
Valley Sound cut the organ down, but I retained the pedals (a heck of an amphenol connector to the console!) and they added percussion. All the internal tube electronics were removed in the interest of weight. Because of this, the tone wheels would produce sound even with the organ shut off and you could do neat effects by hitting the "start" and "run" switches slowing and speeding up the tone wheels.
The output from the tone wheels is just like a guitar pick-up and can be plugged directly into a high impedience input (guitar amp) without any electronic interface. Valley Sound simply added a 1/4" phone jack to the back. (No Jon Lord didn't need a modification to do this and there is an RCA connector above the swell pedal that also gives direct access to the tone wheels.) The Leslies were refinished in black. The cost for this was $3,000 in 1972 dollars. Insurance paid it all.
BTW, my favorite keyboard player is Keith Emerson. But in a whole 'nother vein, George Duke is really good too.
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Originally Posted by Ducatista47
