Combo Commando

Back then, if you couldn’t afford a Hammond (or didn’t have friends to move it), a combo organ was the only choice. Their dulcet cheese-o-rific tones were heard all over the radio in tunes such as “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals and ? and the Mysterians classic “96 Tears,” as well as many Doors hits. As the ’60s psychedelic era faded, so did the combo organ craze, effectively mothballing most of these instruments. But everything comes in cycles, right? Thusly, the new wave movement brought back the humble weeze of the combo organ with artists such as the B-52s, Elvis Costello, and Blondie crankin’ ’em up again (see page 44 for this month’s feature on the Debbie Harry). And more recently, retro organs have been used by artists such as Smashmouth in their hit “Walking On The Sun,” as well as Pulp and The Kaiser Chiefs.

Compact transistor organs utilized a “divide-down” network with an oscillator for each of the top 12 chromatic notes of the scale. The oscillators then ran through circuitry generating pitches in the appropriate lower octaves to cover the entire range of the keyboard. This technique saw continued usage in many string synths, organs, and electronic pianos. Most compact organs also featured a drawbar system where different octaves (as well as intervals) could be layered together to make more complex tones. The drawbars looked a whole lot like a Hammond organ, but they sounded completely different, giving the little transistorized organs their unique plastickey sound.

The  tone generation in a compact organ is relatively archaic by today’s standards, so with some clever tweakery, we can coax some pretty authentic cheese from modern virtual polysynths. For this month’s example, I used Arturia’s big bad Roland Jupiter-8V, but most of the programming can easily be adapted to others. Start out by setting both oscillators to square waves. If there’s a pulse-width control, set it in the middle to achieve the “squarest” tone (i.e., the thickest sound). Now set the oscillators one octave apart. Make sure the fine tuning is set to zero; we don’t want any beating or chorusing between the oscillators, otherwise it will sound like a modern synth and destroy our cheese-organ illusion. Now we need some vibrato! We’ll do this by using a low-frequency oscillator (LFO) set to a sine or triangle wave to modulate the pitch. I set the depth to .035, which is a bit less than a quarter-tone in each direction. I set the speed to 6.22Hz; fast enough to be frenetic, but not fast enough to sound like a synth.

The filter settings are pretty simple. Open the cutoff almost all they way; keep it down a little because everything in the ’60s was a little lo-fi! We won’t need any resonance or filter envelope at all. If you’re using the Jupiter or another synth with an additional highpass filter, use it to filter out a lot of the lows, again helping our lo-fi illusion. If your synth only has a lowpass filter, don’t fret. Just add an EQ plug-in set to highpass after the synth in your mixer, and knock down everything above 500Hz. Think thin! Make sure the volume envelope is set to a simple organ “on-off” shape; attack at zero, decay at zero, sustain full up and a quick release

That’s it. For more fun, try adding a small amount of overdrive or an amp simulator for some grit; I used the Jupiter-8V’s built-in distortion insert effect between the filter and amp sections, but this is a unique feature. A regular plug-in after the synth will work just as well. Be sure to experiment with the oscillators’ octave settings and the the pulse width of the waveforms for thicker and thinner tones. You can download the Jupiter-8V patch and check out audio examples at www.celebutantemusic/keybmag. Until next month, please, pass the combo organ tones and cheese!