6D Organ Bass Question

[alexanderlyon]

You sent me scurrying to the Electro to check this out!

Yeah, even as an absolute beginner, I am starting to grasp there are so many subtle things you can do with all these settings. As someone who has almost exclusively played acoustic piano, it's like having a whole new world of expressive possibilities suddenly open up. And the EPs are a whole other thing!

[Hlaalu]

Yes!!! That is one of the very first things I noticed: Some of the voicings I like most on piano do not work well on organ at all, and some voicings that sound sort of bland on piano sound great on organ.

I wish there was as much information available around regarding chord voicings on the organ as there is for piano voicings. As I said I think part of the reason behind such scarcity is that most jazz organ playing tend to be less focused on chordy stuff to start with, but more on left hand basslines and killing right hand solos.

By the way let's keep this topic alive, I find it very interesting. A potential fellow who could have interesting things to say about this whole thing is analogika, who plays in an organ trio, BUT with a dedicated real bass player.

My wife, who is a percussionist but also plays piano, recently watched me plant the pinky of my right hand on a Bb while playing (or trying to play) lines and moving thirds with my other fingers.

Her reaction: "Well, *that* looks like a recipe for tendinitis!"

But it's so much fun!

My parents used to warn me my hands would hurt if I played too much... with the organ, and apparently one could go blind as well.

[FZiegler]

Looks as if you've got to learn to think differently, as you can shape sounds much more than on the piano and so seem to need to play more with your ear than with your fingers, if you understand what I mean.

Which is why I'm not fully convinced that we would need more info about organ voicings. Anyhow, I'll try to get into it by playing with drawbars and ears (-> harmonics).

[mrsugmad]

But if you do want more info on drawbar settings, check this pdf file out:

[Hlaalu]

Looks as if you've got to learn to think differently, as you can shape sounds much more than on the piano and so seem to need to play more with your ear than with your fingers, if you understand what I mean.

Which is why I'm not fully convinced that we would need more info about organ voicings. Anyhow, I'll try to get into it by playing with drawbars and ears (-> harmonics).

I am not sure that I get what you actually mean. Drawbars allow you to shape your sound for sure, along with other things on the Hammond, but you'll have to play some notes at the end, right?

If you play a certain chord you'll have to play a bunch of notes, by definition. But which "bunch of notes" will sound good, in which part of the range, at which distance from each other, how many of them, and which actual notes (roots, thirds,...) etc. are things that work differently between piano and organ. The piano is more "forgiving" in that some dissonant clustered voicings still sound very acceptable whereas on the organ it takes much less to end up with a unusable muddy sound. We know this "in general", but the point is that the level of voicings knowledge sophistication and details reached on instruments like the piano (and even the guitar I'd think) is now uncomparably higher than the one on the organ -- also because, as I said, it tends to be played differently to start with.

I don't see how drawbars manipulation can work the above around. In fact the more drawbars you pull out, the less dissonant and less dense your voicings will need to be as compared to if you pulled out only, say, the first or the third drawbar. But what this does it to add complexity to it, not remove it.

Either instrument you come from, if you want to play a lot of chords you'll have to rebuild or at least adjust your voicings "vocabulary" to make it work on the other. Which is big time not a trivial thing. But as I was saying, jazz piano teachings are much more structured and easier to access and to learn from. Jazz piano courses at conservatories are now a thing in Italy, something that until some time ago was difficult to imagine. The US were more ahead of time earlier in this respect.

But for organ, you pretty much have to carve your way alone. Most of the knowledge available about the Hammond today is not actually focused on the actual details of the music but, for one part, on the mythical origins of the Machine and its inner workings, its sound, with all its quirks, and for another part on the equally mystic lives and music of the bunch of pioneers who could "feel it" -- which incidentally, it's precisely how the jazz scenery was for example in Italy until not so long ago. Want to learn jazz? You can't. You either "have it" or "dont' have it". Luckily we moved on. I hope the same will happen to the Hammond...

[FZiegler]

Hlaalu, we seem to be similar in the sort of sound we are looking for - relatively clear, not muddy.

I'm totally unexperienced on the organ. Didn't have a single organ lesson in my live. Neither pipe nor tonewheel. So everything I'm saying here is my guess after some hours of listening to performances and testing out sounds and chords.

My point was: If we are talking chords, we should be considering upper harmonics. Which on the organ (especially tonewheel organ) not only come from chords, but from tonewheels first. If you play a single note on an organ, you may or may not already have a full chord sound. Which e.g. means: adding a fifth note may do a lot to your sound, if you've already got a fifth tonewheel emphasized. 'Cause you'll get the fifth of the fifth emphasized. Etc. I haven't found a way through that for now - will have to play more. And won't for sure set up a spectrometer in front of me, but try to open my ears. Probably starting with variations of 'classical' drawbar settings.

In any case, your voicings can't be the same with an open or a full drawbar setting, I imagine.

[Hlaalu]

My point was: If we are talking chords, we should be considering upper harmonics. Which on the organ (especially tonewheel organ) not only come from chords, but from tonewheels first. If you play a single note on an organ, you may or may not already have a full chord sound. Which e.g. means: adding a fifth note may do a lot to your sound, if you've already got a fifth tonewheel emphasized. 'Cause you'll get the fifth of the fifth emphasized. Etc. I haven't found a way through that for now - will have to play more. And won't for sure set up a spectrometer in front of me, but try to open my ears. Probably starting with variations of 'classical' drawbar settings.

In any case, your voicings can't be the same with an open or a full drawbar setting, I imagine.

Ah, I see what you mean. That makes sense in theory because it's what happens from an acoustics/physics point of view too. If you play all the drawbars out you are basically playing a major triad with a single note, and if you listen out of context, that's what it sounds like too. But in practice, that's not how things really mix up together for the ear/brain when you listen in context. In fact any instrument will have a timbre composed of harmonics, and if you could dissect them, you'd also find a lot of fifths, thirds, octaves, and other more dissonant intervals, but at the end, you generally don't hear the outcoming sound as a "chord", but as a note, only different in timbre, depending on which harmonics are more prominent (harmonics are in fact what a timbre is composed of). On the Hammond and pipe organs this is just more evident because you have physical drawbars or stops that you know are associated with harmonics that you can move in an out. But the physics is the same for other instruments too, including the piano.

On the Hammond, the way I personally see drawbars is somewhere in between an equalizer and a timbre sculpting device, but what they are certainly not is a harmonizing device, apart from perhaps some extreme registrations. In fact if they had such a function, apart for the obvious unconvenience of keep moving them as chords change (!), their impact on the music would be devastating. You couldn't play anything coherent with the harmony of the song, because you'd be either playing fifths or major triads at best. OR, by pressing more than one key, a whole messy jam of notes with no harmonic sense whatsoever. But that's not how the notes come out. Chords still make sense for what they are even with all drawbars out, it's just the sound, or timbre, that becomes increasingly muddy. That's why you need more sort of "minimalist" voicings.

[Bjosko]

Well totally OT, but this is an example of the extreme registrations (actually not, he are using the Hammond presets in an original way)

[Bjosko]

Some more tips here, there was an interesting thread some years ago on the same forum where a skilled jazz piano guy tried to convert his playing skills to organ, but I couldn’t find that exact thread.
http://forums.musicplayer.com/ubbthread ... ning-organ

[alexanderlyon]

Thanks for the useful resources, mrsugmad and Bjosko!

Interesting discussion on the state of formal jazz theory vs. the state of formal instruction on organ voicings.

This too might be totally OT, but personally, I have mixed feelings about jazz theory, and it colors the way I think about this issue.

I am a product of the formal jazz education system: I started off learning on my own, found a couple of teachers, then studied jazz in university. One of my mentors wrote a book on jazz harmony, which I ultimately used as a textbook when teaching others.

I found what I learned about harmony and theory to be immensely useful; I still use many of the voicings I first learned decades ago from my own teachers, and many of the ones I developed on my own are based on them. They gave me a way into jazz harmony.

But I became dismayed at how much my own students relied on theory at the expense of intense listening and experimentation. Unlike physics, music theory is purely descriptive, rather than predictive; it simply crystallizes what musicians have historically done in practice. And it does not take into account such ephemeral but crucial concepts as musical context, rhythmic placement, or stylistic "fit."

If you want to figure out how to use what you have learned about jazz harmony in a formal setting, you have to listen to the people from whose music the theory derives. Bill Evans didn't always use the same "Bill Evans voicings"; he used voicings he liked where and when he wanted to. And much of what he played bears the same resemblance to the contents of a jazz harmony book as a real lion does to a plush toy.

So if there was a book on organ voicings, I'm sure I'd check it out; and I would happily take whatever insights and general principles I could from it. But I think I'd move away from it as quickly as possible, and go back to listening to Brian Charette and Dr. Lonnie Smith for pointers, using whatever I had learned to further my investigations.