[LAU] Connie, an organ template for JACK

Nick Copeland nickycopeland at hotmail.com
Sun May 31 07:10:25 EDT 2009


I get the click too, and also a bit of aliasing noise on my system but that could just be me, did not test it widely.

The original keyboard did have a bit of keyclick however it was not as pronounced as the Hammond and as such never got picked up as a character of the sound. Apart from that, the Hammond was popular also with jazz keyboardists, the Vox only ever really penetrated the rock market.

The Vox had the same multiple contacts under each key and again, pressing a key slowly would sound each harmonic separately, not noticeable really when playing - you have to like move the key with a micrometer screwguage to be able to hear them. Each key also had a separate generation PCB that did the master oscillator division, waveform extraction from the master clock and this probably also had a key grooming circuit to reduce noise, especially shelving noise from the contacts (which was a large part of the Hammond sound). Most of the click I got from Connie only noticable on note_off rather than note_on but both of these could be improved with a grooming circuit. Also, as with all frequency division circuits it was not an equally tempered scale - every note is an integral division of the master clock which I understand ran at 2MHz and some notes were up to 1.6 cents out. There are kind of two issues with emulating that, firstly the midi tables here are for ET pitch rather than integer division, and then each wave I think is separately generated thus has no phase relation since each voice here looks like a separate phase accumultor. The phase accumulation probably has little effect since your frequency tables are going to be very accurate although purists might argue that ET scaling vs. an organ divider circuit is audible when playing chords.

The vibrato is perhaps a bit slow too and although the original be modified by a surface mounted pot I am sure that House of the Rising Sun, another Vox classic, had it run faster than this? The pot wasn't very accessible admittedly, and it was generally glued with that red paste to stop it from travelling however there were a few that had this pulled out to a panel mounted pot to be configurable, maybe only on the later Italian models after Jennings had sold the rights. Perhaps just out of interest more than anything, the current rights to Vox and Continental is held by Korg Inc of Japan, not that they have done anything with rights to the organ. If you ever saw one of these keyboards it was pretty spectacular: reverse white/black keys, bright orange panel and the still quite futuristic Z Bar frame. They should re-release it. 

I have owned a couple of these over the years, an original very rare Jennings handbuilt with laquered wooden key action, extremely light touch, and then later the Italian plastic keyed dual manual Super. The latter actually had the original Z Bars (the Jennings model only came as is) but the sound was not quite as warm as the handbuilt ones.

Regards, Nick.

> From: reuben.m at gmail.com
> To: linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 00:15:13 -0500
> Subject: Re: [LAU] Connie, an organ template for JACK
> 
> 
> Really like the sound of it. Has a bit of a harsh tick sound when pressing a 
> key. Not sure if that's supposed to be a "key click" or if the audio generated 
> for a new note is just sent as-is without fading it in.
> 
> -Reuben
> 
> 
> Check it, yo!: Martin Homuth-Rosemann was sayin:
> > Hi,
> >
> > sorry, just realized that the hammond discussion mentioned below was here
> > and not at LAD, so please allow this kind of "crosspost":
> >
> > this is my first post to LAD. The discussion about a hammond simulation
> > "Fons could you make us...", Beatrix and some research for writing a
> > (german) wikipedia article (stub) about the Vox Continental inspired me to
> > hack a quick organ program that simulates the internal signal flow of the
> > "Connie" with JACK MIDI input and JACK audio output.
> > Have fun:
> > http://cryptomys.de/horo/Connie/Connie-0.1.tar.gz
> >
> > Ciao
> > Martin Homuth-Rosemann
> 
> 
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> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
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