Nord User Forum

Hi,

does anyone have any hints how to recreate the synth-organ sound on those Joan Jett recordings (links with timestamps)
https://youtu.be/2sky1tt8vLA?t=34
https://youtu.be/bpNw7jYkbVc?t=22

Is this just a held power (7th) chord with a very refined sound or do the fingers move really quickly / trills? Does anybody know the instrument? Some early FM synth or organ?
I think it's done by Kenny Laguna but didn't find anything obvious on the web.
Any input is appreciated...

To me it seems that it is a synthesizer that mimics the organ sound. In these days It wasn't easy to carry around a piece of furniture!
By the way, I really find no reason to try to simulate the simulation of a real organ, since I have an instrument that can mimic the real thing better than those early synthsesizers. I bet that if they had a nord back then, they would use a pure B3 sound! However, if I wanted to gve that 80's color to the sound, I would layer an organ with an 80's polysynth sample, an OB6 or polymoog. I would also add some LFO to modulate the sample in order to give this tremolo effect (they probably did the same to simulate the lesslie effect).

They used Prophets and things for those organ sounds partly because they needed an organ sound and had one around, but mostly, the used them to have something that played and worked like a Hammond but wasn’t a Hammond and didn’t sound like one.

Every professional production studio had a Hammond sitting around; if they’d wanted the sound, they would have used one.

You mean that a real hammond sounded a bit old and coservative to them and they wanted something modern and fresh but to work in a similar way? maybe you got in point on that, in that era synths were developing rapidly and started taking over classical instruments, at least in mainstream music. In any case, regarding the particular songs, those synth lines are fillers, they don't play major role in the song's structure. So I still can't find a reason to emulate it exactly, except maybe of sound design challenge!