Best Hammond B3 VI

[Babz]

Yes that is what UVI does, mod wheel crossfade. And, yes, it is a flawed approach. For the very reasons you point out. However, I have never heard a great Leslie emulation plug-in. And B4's amp distortion is terrible. Everything has its pros and cons and limitations. But I still think an amped and miced real Leslie can give you convincing results in a limited snapshot sort of way. I like all of these different products but none of them is perfect. Each of them can require various playing or mixing techniques to use them effectively. I haven't tried Guido's B3 product yet, but it sounds really great from the demos.

[David Polich]

Yes that is what UVI does, mod wheel crossfade. And, yes, it is a flawed approach. For the very reasons you point out. However, I have never heard a great Leslie emulation plug-in. And B4's amp distortion is terrible. Everything has its pros and cons and limitations. But I still think an amped and miced real Leslie can give you convincing results in a limited snapshot sort of way. I like all of these different products but none of them is perfect. Each of them can require various playing or mixing techniques to use them effectively. I haven't tried Guido's B3 product yet, but it sounds really great from the demos.

Neo Instruments Ventilator II is the best
Leslie simulator I've heard. Unfortunately
it is not a plugin - its a hardware pedal.
And it is about 500 bucks..pricey.

[mikehalloran]

I got an email on this yesterday. I know it's samples, not modeling but I like many of the sounds that are in the demo. For $99, doesn't appear to be a bad buy.

http://www.uvi.net/en/vintage-corner/retro-organs.html

I got an email today with a sale price dropped to $49. I decided to pull the trigger. If the demos were all that it includes, I'm good. There is some manipulation in the UVI player. I haven't opened them in MachFive3 yet.

It's kind of a nice group of many of my favorite Hammond sounds.

[williemyers]

....I got an email today with a sale price dropped to $49.

I wonder if that's a "for previous customers only" price? It's still showing up @ $99 for me...

[b.g.]

The UVI audio demos sound good, but I didn't hear any with scanner vibrato.

[dave pine]

yesterday it was $49, today $99

[mikehalloran]

While looking up this and that, I came across a very interesting article. It includes common mic techniques for Leslie speakers:

http://theatreorgans.com/hammond/faq/my ... stery.html

and this:

http://theatreorgans.com/hammond/faq/ha ... .html#SEC1

http://www.dairiki.org/HammondWiki/Leslie

While none of these discuss simulations or samples, understanding how the real deal works never hurts.

I didn't hear any with scanner vibrato.

It turns out that I have that effect - I'd have to fire up my copy of Logic or Soundtrack Pro to use it, however. I probably have a simulator in other programs, too.

http://documentation.apple.com/en/logic ... tasks=true

[HCMarkus]

I just ordered the "Mini Vent - Organ" by Neo ($350) for my live rig. I think it is going to be great, with two presets that allow programming of drive and virtual mic distance, so I can vary the dirt in my organ sound. I have been unsatisfied with my MOTIF ES6 Leslie sims since day one, and am finally going to do something about it!

I'll be running only organ sounds thru the Mini Vent, from the Motif's Aux outputs, then back into the Motif via the stereo analog ins. Volume pedal will be pre-FX, allowing me to swell into grind when desired. I'll velcro the unit onto the top of my Motif and switch fact/slow rotor speeds by hand. With the mod wheel freed up (it used ot control Leslie speed), I'll use it to add "drawbars" when desired... OK, it won't be truly authentic, but it should be very cool and vibey in live situations, and I can still use other ES6 sounds (clav and BC-controlled horns) unaffected.

[TinenTech]

The scanner vibrato of a B3 can be emulated by most delay-line chorus effects. "Chorus" in Hammond lingo is a mixture of the vibrato signal with the non-vibrato signal in varying amounts. Almost always when playing a real B3 (or C3 or M3 or A100) organists will turn on the vibrato chorus at the same time as putting the Leslie on fast; it's the mixture of the three vibratos (hi rotor, lo rotor, and organ vibrato) that gives it the "sheen" that's so popular.

The crucial detail that sampled organs miss is: the Percussion signal doesn't go thru the Hammond vibrato. Vibrato affects only the drawbar tones. Both then go through the Leslie.

The Alesis QS keyboards had an elaborate built-in effects processor that let you route a percussion signal separately from the drawbar tones, with both going through a Leslie effect at the end. Unfortunately the Leslie effect had a little glitch in it that was audible when you really pushed it with no dry signal; you could program it so it wasn't noticeable at high or low speeds, but not both.

Given that the designers of the QS went on to found Line 6, I bet they have a great Leslie patch in some of their guitar emulators...but we keyboardists don't know about them.

[David Polich]

I just ordered the "Mini Vent - Organ" by Neo ($350) for my live rig. I think it is going to be great, with two presets that allow programming of drive and virtual mic distance, so I can vary the dirt in my organ sound. I have been unsatisfied with my MOTIF ES6 Leslie sims since day one, and am finally going to do something about it!

I'll be running only organ sounds thru the Mini Vent, from the Motif's Aux outputs, then back into the Motif via the stereo analog ins. Volume pedal will be pre-FX, allowing me to swell into grind when desired. I'll velcro the unit onto the top of my Motif and switch fact/slow rotor speeds by hand. With the mod wheel freed up (it used ot control Leslie speed), I'll use it to add "drawbars" when desired... OK, it won't be truly authentic, but it should be very cool and vibey in live situations, and I can still use other ES6 sounds (clav and BC-controlled horns) unaffected.

You don;'t need to do such a complex routing.

You can simply run the Motif's left and right out into the Mini Vent, and from there to your D.I. or the house snake or your mixer. The Mini Vent has a "bypass" switch - just hit that when you're not using an organ sound.

If you run the organ sounds from the Motif via the Aux Outs, that means you will have to put
all your organ voices into performances...actually, you'll have to be in performance mode period. Each performance have up to four voices, split or layered, as you know.

You can certainly set things up the way you described...I just think it's kind of convoluted.

[Prime Mover]

Given that the designers of the QS went on to found Line 6, I bet they have a great Leslie patch in some of their guitar emulators...but we keyboardists don't know about them.

Wow, I didn't know that! Being a long time QS player (retired the guts 3 years ago though), interesting to hear what became of that team. Truth be told, the QS was not an incredible synth, obviously going for simplicity and price over true quality. Lack of a resonant filter was a crime. They did well with what they had though, and the presets were very high caliber for what they were working with. But compared to the offerings of Korg and Yamaha at the time, it was kind of emberrassing. I will say though, that it was such a breeze to program, that I was often able to make new sounds on the fly in the middle of rehearsal, which I would never attempt to do with a more robust synth.

That said, in the middle of an otherwise mediocre board, the Leslie sim was surprisingly good, one of the best I've heard from a rompler. Kinda defied all expectations, and made for some fairly decent organ sounds (though their original samples were not that great). Unfortunately, though Alesis made a big deal about their awesome effects processor, it was an absolute DOG to program. Kind of the polar opposite of the rest of the synth, which was simple yet limited, the effects processor squeezed out a myriad possibilities only by virtue of re-arranging itself into different modes meant for different purposes. You were forced to choose what group of effects you wanted to use at any given time, and often had to make major tradeoffs. The most difficult thing they chose to do was to have only one effects unit and completely divorce it from the rest of the synth (I believe that even another processor handled it), so there was no such thing as an insert effect on the synth, you had to route each patch in a setup into the effects processor. They got by this by having SOME of the modes have the equivalent of about 2-4 stereo busses each with its own effects settings; however, to save on CPU, the higher busses often had much more limited functionality. The whole thing was extremely cumbersome to deal with.

The QS is obviously a relic of a long dead generation. But I must admit, the entire time I had one, I drooled over Korgs and Kurzweils, which offered decent analog modeling and much cleaner interface solutions for effects. I often thought of my QS as sort of a cheap toy by comparison, though I know Korgs in particular had their own shortcomings.

[David Polich]

There's a Hammond B3 "new sheriff in town", so to speak. HammR+ from Sound Dust.

http://www.sound-dust.com

I took the plunge and bought it. It is a sample-based instrument that runs inside Kontakt5.
The sampling is very high quality, and you can customize your own vibrato/chorus settings,
ADSR, and overtones (Sound Dust refers to that as "Saturation") per drawbar. Second and third percussion is available simultaneously. The samples are "clean" as in they weren't sampled with the Leslie.The VI includes Kontakt's own rotary speaker emulation, which is the same one found on NI's Vintage Organs. The rotary is "ok" and works
in a mix, but for a better rotary plug-in, I went with Melda Productions' MVintage Rotary plug-in, which is the best Leslie plug-in simulator I've heard yet:

http://www.meldaproduction.com/plugins/ ... tageRotary

The combination of HammR+ and MVintage Rotary, to my ears, beats both GSI's B3 and
UVI's. The only drawback is that you have to run DP in Multi-Record mode so you can control
MVintage Rotary while triggering HammR+. Or, you can just choose to run HammR+ with its
"own" Leslie and therefore no need to run DP in MultiRecord.

[HCMarkus]

I'll be running only organ sounds thru the Mini Vent, from the Motif's Aux outputs, then back into the Motif via the stereo analog ins.... and I can still use other ES6 sounds (clav and BC-controlled horns) unaffected.

You don't need to do such a complex routing.

You can simply run the Motif's left and right out into the Mini Vent, and from there to your D.I. or the house snake or your mixer. The Mini Vent has a "bypass" switch - just hit that when you're not using an organ sound.

If you run the organ sounds from the Motif via the Aux Outs, that means you will have to put
all your organ voices into performances...actually, you'll have to be in performance mode period. Each performance have up to four voices, split or layered, as you know.

You can certainly set things up the way you described...I just think it's kind of convoluted.

Thanks Dave... I know you know Motif programming better than anyone!

The reason I will go the route described is because I use my Motif as a second (upper) keyboard for it's organ action, but also route MIDI to it from my primary (lower) controller, an S90ES. This allows me to simultaneously layer sounds from the Motif, which is in Mix Mode. I never change patches on the Motif, just address different Motif MIDI channels from the S90.

Most of my live shows these days are with a funk/soul/R&B band, so having immediate access to Piano, Rhodes, Organ, a fat Pad, and BC-controlled Brass allows me to do the show without changing patches, other than toggling back and forth between piano, Rhodes and Clav. I'm excited to add the sound of the Mini-Vent processed organ as icing on the cake!

[David Polich]

You're welcome. I've been thinking of grabbing the Mini vent myself, to tell you the truth.
At $350 it's still a bit pricey. But that's still way less than Nord or Hammond wants for their hardware clone wheel organs.

[BobK]

There's a Hammond B3 "new sheriff in town", so to speak. HammR+ from Sound Dust.

http://www.sound-dust.com

I took the plunge and bought it. It is a sample-based instrument that runs inside Kontakt5.
The sampling is very high quality, and you can customize your own vibrato/chorus settings,
ADSR, and overtones (Sound Dust refers to that as "Saturation") per drawbar. Second and third percussion is available simultaneously. The samples are "clean" as in they weren't sampled with the Leslie.The VI includes Kontakt's own rotary speaker emulation, which is the same one found on NI's Vintage Organs. The rotary is "ok" and works
in a mix, but for a better rotary plug-in, I went with Melda Productions' MVintage Rotary plug-in, which is the best Leslie plug-in simulator I've heard yet:

http://www.meldaproduction.com/plugins/ ... tageRotary

The combination of HammR+ and MVintage Rotary, to my ears, beats both GSI's B3 and
UVI's. The only drawback is that you have to run DP in Multi-Record mode so you can control
MVintage Rotary while triggering HammR+. Or, you can just choose to run HammR+ with its
"own" Leslie and therefore no need to run DP in MultiRecord.

Dave - that sound-dust link doesn't work. Correct link is:

http://dulcitone1884.virb.com/hammr+

Thanks for the post - I hadn't heard of the HamMR+.

I haven't forgiven NI for discontinuing B4 II for no apparent reason. Instead of trying to get it to work in Mavericks, I picked up HamMR+. Sounds good to me, though I don't have much experience with B3s.

Strange how the rotary emulator plugin is more expensive than the B3 library, even with the discount...