Tag: recordingartists

Spinning Your Tonewheels with the Vintage B3

(Page 155, Logic Pro X For Dummies)

The Hammond B3 is an important part of music history, and with the Vintage B3, you can put its sonic stamp on your own music. Since the Hammond B3 organ is found in country, gospel, reggae, rock, jazz, pop, and more, it’s safe to say that you’ll want to use the Vintage B3.

The Vintage B3 software instrument and rotor cabinet simulation emulate the real thing to the point that you can edit the age of a single component to make your organ sound fresh from the factory or 50 years old!

Understanding Drawbars

Your drawbars are your main tools for tone shaping. You can always get to them quickly by using your track’s smart controls or by clicking the Main button, which is on the top control bar of the Vintage B3 organ interface.

Take a look at your three sets of drawbars — Upper, Pedals, and Lower. Pull the drawbar out (by pulling down) to make the drawbar louder, and push the drawbar in (by pulling up) to make the drawbar quieter or silent. Drawbars are like mixer faders but in reverse.

The upper and lower nine drawbars correspond to the upper and lower keyboards of a Hammond B3 organ. These two keyboards are called manuals. B3 players usually play bass lines and rhythm parts on the lower manual and solos and melodies on the upper manual, though anything goes in the hands of a skilled musician. The pedal drawbars correspond to the B3 foot pedals. Each set of drawbars control the volume of different aspects of the pitch you are playing.

Sine waves and the harmonic series

The Hammond B3 tone wheel was designed to create a pure sine wave, the simplest sound in existence. Playing a key on the B3 spins a tone wheel that generates a pure pitch. Every pitch corresponded to a frequency, which is the number of cycles that the sound completes in one second. All sounds except a pure sine wave contain different frequencies based on the mathematical harmonic series.

The third drawbar of the Hammond B3 is close to a pure sine wave. The other drawbars are frequencies of the harmonic series, and control the complexity of the sound so that you can create and mold sounds similar to a flute, an oboe, a trumpet, or even a string section.

Find out more about using drawbars, loading and playing the vintage instruments, producing classic and creative tones, and understanding keyboard and synthesizer fundamentals in Chapter 10 of Logic Pro X For Dummies.

Drawbars will get your tone in shape! 💪🎹