Changes in Vox Continental modelling

[analogika]

Gotta say it - I'm not sure why anyone would even want to use the Vox, for anything. I know nostalgia dies hard, but there is a reason the Continental is not made anymore and no-one is using it at a professional level - on stage or in the studio (here come "examples" to prove me wrong).

Two nights ago my band gigged at a pool hall and I decided to use the Vox emulation on my Electro 6 for our cover of Somebody to Love, by Jefferson Airplane. Admittedly this kind of tune is not totally in our wheelhouse - it requires everyone to be pretty loose and 60s-ish and my fellow bandmates are not that. Since I actually lived in the 60s, unlike any of them, I can roughly approximate it. BUT - the Vox sounded terrible. Like a toy instrument, thin and icky. After about 16 measures I scurried back to the B3.

I totally understand the feeling, and the impulse, but: you're wrong.

Context is everything.
For one, what works depends mostly on the guitars' and/or horns' approach. Yes, the choice of organ is second fiddle to how the whole mix works. Not easy to accept, but production reality. You can force your own attitude (and I did for many years until I met a producer for whom I've been doing a lot of work in the past years), but a B3 is a particular type of cliché that immediately nails a song down to a particular style or genre — there's a bandwidth there, but a Hammond instantly colours everything it touches, and the song may not want that, or it may even be absolutely essential that a song NOT go that way.

Farfisa/VOX/philicorda are even more blatant than the Hammond, of course (which can be so wonderfully subtle), but it moves a song into a completely different space.

And since you expected examples:
For the Angels, we chose the philicorda for this track:

A Hammond could have been made to work, but it would have taken the song right out of the Garage-Soul everything-mono-f*ck-this-sh*t corner and moved it to Detroit, in a sense. Wrong attitude for the song.

Compare to this track — same singer, same band, same album, same producer, same keyboard player (me) but with a Hammond (of course):

[Gambold]

Well the B3 sounds better! And a Philicorda is not a crappy Vox Continental

[NeFerreira]

I agree that something got lost with the Electro B3 between the Electro 4 and Electro 6, although I'm not a skilled enough organ player to say exactly what. But regardless...it blew away the Vox. I would say just dump the Vox and Farfisa for the next model and sink all the money into improving the B3. I know, heresy...but trust me, you won't miss them, especially if they are replaced with better Hammond options.

Sorry but I disagree. As a The Doors fan the Vox Continental is essencial for me. The reason that makes the Nord Vox doesn't soud right is a octave problem with the IV mixture and the drawbars tones that I mentioned early. Or you simply doen's like the sound. If you want to dump something dump the pipe