Introducing Myself

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As a long-time organ player I've always had one in the corner of our living room; now a mid-1960's 2 manual Allen theater that finally became hopelessly unreliable, now sitting there gutted of its switching and tone generation, awaiting a transplant. In an adjacent corner is a nice Baldwin model R grand that I bought for the kids that they enjoyed a lot growing up. The opposite corners each contain a Leslie 122.

A bunch of years ago I rose to the occasion when our small church group needed someone to play for the occasional funeral, wedding and other service. Since the variety and condition of instruments in the various places ranged to such an extent, I finally bought a Roland-Rogers W-50 with sampled pipe organ sounds, which though obsolete, I still have. It sounds great, but has always been difficult to play because of limited polyphony.

Now with age and extensive health problems I've done an in-depth review of my many interests and decided to focus on music as one that can be continued into old age. I want to up-grade the Allen, perhaps with new keyboards and Hauptwerk, but in a modular fashion so that should health/age issues dictate moving into a smaller place with no place for a large organ console, a stack of 2 or 3 controller keyboards could be removed from the Allen and placed on a small table along with a lap top.

One option might be to base this on one of the dual manual combo organs such as made by Nord or Suzuki Hammond. I'm sure I'm not treading fresh ground, but believe there are some on this forum who have good advice.

Loren
 

happyrat1

Destroyer of Eardrums!!!
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Welcome aboard Loren. Wow you sound like a real veteran organist and hacker and while I can't offer you too much in the way of constructive suggestions just wait til Delaware Dave shows up and chimes in on this discussion. Dave's the ultimate purist Hammond freak around here and if you are needing suggestions he should be the one who comes thru for ya.

In the meantime feel free to surf thru the forums and see what we're all about. We're a pretty informal bunch ranging from rank amateurs to seasoned pros all joined by our love of keyboards and music. ;)

Gary
 
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Welcome Loren. I'm an older member here who spent a lot of time gigging on organ in past years. I had a couple of the "combo organs" in the 60's, and then moved to the old tone wheel Hammond's. These days I cover organs parts with a Korg CX3 (Hammond clone-wheel) or Casio XWP1 synth. The newer Hammond XK line is really nice if you're looking at current technology. Don
 
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A Hammond SX2 with a couple of inexpensive keyboard controllers, such as offered by Acorn Instruments for approx $100 in a 61key version at a local music / keyboard outlet would accommodate a 4-manual pipe organ via Hauptwerk. With my hands / arms messed up due to complications during fistula development, I would also need to come up with auto accompaniment ability. Being new to current keyboard technology and feeling completely uninitiated in the computer branch of music development and production, I'll be stepping pretty slowly into that area. I do surmise the industry will be more advanced and mature than I expect. I don't think the Hammond has that feature built-in, though.

In that case a single manual Hammond SK1 and a Yamaha MO F6, or equivalent offering from Korg, Kurzweil would be a real killer setup. Guess the ball's in my court to bring this from a pipe dream to reality.

Loren
 

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