Forum Organists: question re Hammonds or other

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Kawai Pianos

generally are fabulous, that is, their concert grands I should say. The church I left about a year ago had a 7-foot Kawai and I still miss it dearly. It had a wonderful, full and rich tone quality. In the bass it sounded like a 9-foot Steinway!!

But there was a pretty good tradeoff -- my new church has a fabulous three-manual 1957 Casavant! It's got a big, rich sound - very lush and romantic, not at all the pseudo-baroque "squeekers" that came along just after that period. My new church has a crummy piano (Kimball baby grand - ugh), but the old one had a crummy pipe organ so I guess all in all I'm rather happier! Plus the people are nicer!!

btw HI everyone! I still look at the postings here from time to time, but generally just post on vacuumland.org since that's my main obsession! :)
 
SAVILLE ORGANS

Saville church organs were manufactured from the late 1960s up through 1991, and were quite successful for a period of time.

These were custom-built electronic organs. Unique to them was that every note of every stop had its own separate tone generator unit (oscillator), much the same way that a pipe organ has a pipe for every note and stop (generally speaking). the obvious difference was that the sounds were all electronic and since there were no pipes, blowers, etc., took up much less room.

This note/stop-independent generation system proved to be a double-edged sword: It gave a very rich ensemble sound, but in their large organs with thousands of oscillators, imagine the tech support nightmares. Especially in their old instruments from the 1960s which contained thousands of wax capacitors. Once some of them started to fail, it was only a matter of time before you had a major repair headache on your hands.

The largest Saville, four manuals and about a hundred stops, was installed in a concert hall somewhere in the Midwest. Don't recall exactly where offhand now. It was a big success when it was installed, and was written up in all the church organ journals. For its time, it was quite an amazing instrument. That it was begrudgingly hailed by the "pipe organs only" crowd was a testament to its success. However, once its electronic components began to age and fail, it was only a matter of time before it became a huge white elephant and got to the point where it was totally unplayable. It was eventually removed from the concert hall. I don't know what ever became of it.

The Saville Organ Co. still exists in Wichita, Kansas, but only continuing to support existing Saville organs. They do not make organs anymore.

In the mid 1990s, several employees from Saville, including Bob Mote and Dennis J. Ensminger, formed a new company called Dentronics. What they do is upgrade older analog organs such as Allen and Rodgers and retrofit them with new digital components from, I think, Musicom. They do not manufacture any new instruments.

I got to know Bob, Dennis, and the other Saville people back in the mid 1980s when I was playing for a large church in Hollywood. That church had a wonderful, acoustically perfect sanctuary, but no room whatsoever for a pipe organ thanks to the stupid architect who failed to provide space for one. So they were considering the idea of a large, custom electronic to replace their aging Allen analog organ from the 1960s (gawd, what an awful sound that thing had!!).

I drew up a specification for a four-manual custom instrument of about 150 stops and submitted it to Saville soliciting a bid. They flew me to their plant in Wichita to see how their organs are built, and took me to see several local installations. One in particular, in a large Catholic church, had an incredible sound.

When I got back from Wichita the church got a letter from Saville including their bid proposal....... of One Million Dollars and change!!! And keep in mind this was almost 20 years ago! The church fathers were having no part of spending that kind of money on any organ, let alone an electronic!

I resigned from that church before they got a new organ but I have heard that what they ended up getting was a Rodgers 960 (large three-manual) with a few pipe ranks.
 
Saville: Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House

Charlie:

Reason I asked is that Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House in Palo Alto (on the grounds of Stanford, and now belonging to the University) has a Saville, put in by the original owners, Jean and Paul Hanna. They were absolutely thrilled with it. My understanding is that the organ installation is still in place, but that it is disused, and that no repairs can currently be made for funding reasons. The Hanna House sustained a lot of earthquake damage some years back, so structural issues get priority. There are lots of stories about wonderful musicales given by the Hannas in the house.
 
Maggie, before you blame a "stupid architect" for the lack of space in a church for a pipe organ you might find out if that was a programmatic requirement during the design of the sanctuary. Pipe organs are costly and take up a lot of space, and if the church management didn't want one as a part of the design and provide the architect with some specifications for a pipe organ then he can hardly be called stupid for not allocating space for such an organ.
 
No, he was stupid.

Not just my opinion but the consensus of pretty much the entire church.

After the building was completed, they started soliciting bids from pipe organ builders. One after another told them point blank that there was simply nowhere to put a pipe organ of sufficient size and power to fill the room.

So, I guess you could say that in some ways the church officials were a bit stupid as well, since they never thought to ask about space for an organ. And the organist at the time was a "Linda Left Foot" who could hardly play a four-part hymn, let alone be an expert in consulting on the process of designing and installing a large pipe organ. (In fact, the boomy Allen Electronic was her choice, and heartily recommended by her.)

But of all the people, the one person who SHOULD have known better was ... the architect.

It was a very large auditorium; provision for a pipe organ could easily have been made. He just didn't think of it.

No offense meant if you or a loved one is an architect ... but the simple fact is that they are not all Frank Lloyd Wrights ....... some of them are, well, pretty stupid.
 
Saville at Stanford

I don't know anything about that Saville, but I imagine any electronic, even a Saville, would be greatly overshadowed by the two large pipe organs in the chapel at Stanford -- one a ~70-stop mechanical-action organ from the early 1980s by Fisk, the other a Murray Harris organ of about 60 stops from 1901.

That was an interesting engineering feat when they installed the Fisk. It was installed between the two halves of the Harris organ which had twin cases on the far-left and -right sides of the organ loft.

A friend who is very familiar with the organs there told me that originally the Harris case had extended across the middle section of the organ loft as one case but at some point in its history it was literally cut into two halves and separated.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/religiouslife/memchuOrgans.html
 
I have a Kimball organ with the "magic chord", and all of the cheesy built-in rhythmns, along with a bunch of songbooks. For someone like me (with little musical training, and even less talent, but still likes playing music) it's perfect.

Of course, I'm stuck in a time warp, because I think they stopped making sheet music for these units back in 1975 or so, but that's OK. I find it very thereapeutic. I just wish it had some of the more esoteric beats (cha cha, country, "teen beat", etc)
 
Um, Maggie you made my point, which is that the church organist chose the Allen Electronic organ and "heartily recommended" it. No doubt that is exactly why nobody at the church asked for pipe orgen space. As with many specialties of the architectural profession, church architecture is mostly practiced by those who do it regularly. They aren't likely to forget a specific request by their clients, especially for a large piece of equipment which should be built in during the construction process, not after the fact. Pipe organs are nice, so it's a shame that if the church was able to afford one they didn't put it one their list of requirements for the new sanctuary . . . perhaps the organist had been wined and dined handsomely by the local reps of the Allen Electronic Organ Co!

FWIW, Frank Lloyd Wright was one of those rare architects who had no problems with telling his clients what they needed, whether or not they wanted it. This attitude cost him many clients throughout his career, and only his unquestioned brilliance allowed him to overcome it professionally. His arrogance extended to not listening to engineers regarding steel placement in concrete, and now some important Wright buildings need extensive reconstuction because the concrete is literally falling apart due to insufficient steel.
 
Looks like someone just wants to quibble.

So I should probably just drop this. Which I will, after making the point that the organist did not have the power or authority to decide what organ the church got. She simply made a recommendation based on her experience. And she made that recommendation AFTER the church was built, not before.

I am not sure why this is such a sore point, that sometimes architects DO make mistakes. In particular with church facilities, all you have to do is take a look around at a few of them and see many astonishing blunders -- particularly regarding acoustics and acoustical treatment.

After being a church organist for 35 years, I have seen some incredibly bad choices that were made by architects.

Okay, nuff said. It's really not worth arguing about.
 
P.S.

And YOU made MY point by telling about the HUGE mistake that Frank Lloyd Wright made of not sufficiently reinforcing concrete with steel! Even the Great One was capable of making bad judgment calls ... e.g., MISTAKES.
 
Optigan

was a fun and interesting device but basically just a toy. It had a lot of moving, mechanical parts that soon wore out especially if you used it a lot. You changed the sound it made by inserting transluscent plastic disks about the size of a 45 record. The disks were some sort of optical media that were read by an optical sensor. Despite being a toy, it was a pretty sophisticated idea. The different disks included orchestral instruments, full orchestra, organs, strings, and so on.

A friend of mine had one and it broke after just a few months. Nowadays, since it's such obsolete technology you would have a very hard time finding someone who could repair it.

A similar instrument, but more durable and road-worthy, was called the Mellotron. It was invented in the early 1970s. The way it worked was that it contained 1/4" magnetic tape loops (the same size tape as used in reel-to-reel tape recorders if anyone here remembers those!) I believe it only had one kind of sound, a string chorus. But this was pre-synthesizer where the only other option was to hire "real" string players.

Quite a few rock groups used the Mellotron in the 70s, mostly "symphonic rock" groups such as ELO, Rick Wakeman, Pink Floyd, etc., and perhaps most extensively by the Moody Blues. But even the Beatles and Rolling Stones used the instrument.
 
HI there, If you get a Hammond with the tonewheel generator and a Leslie speaker, the slow speed doesn't sound too bad when it comes to playing classical organ music. I think an Allen or something close to that is the way to go. Happy playing. Gary
 
Maggie . . .

My only quibble was with your assumption that the architect was stupid if the final church design didn’t meet your own programmatic requirements. Of course architects make mistakes, everyone does, even Frank Lloyd Wright, but that doesn’t make them stupid people regardless of their profession! Most architects have to listen to their clients better than Wright, though, or they will no longer have careers. He was brilliant but difficult.

I have consulted in a professional capacity on one church in my architectural career, and I can tell you it was a very, very tough job reconciling the various requirements of the church membership, the church leaders, two levels of local government and adjacent neighbors. Because my job on that project was primarily to facilitate a Conditional Use Permit to construct the church in the first place I don’t know if the church leaders approved hiring an acoustical consultant to deal with the acoustics, but if they didn’t then the sound quality was going to be a surprise as very few architects have the education or experience to provide professional level consulting on acoustic issues. All I can say is that after successfully completing my part of the project I was relieved to not have to deal with any more churches.

To all you Hammond guys: I just love the sound of a B-3 with a Leslie! Among my favorite artists are Joey DeFrancesco, Jimmy Smith, Tony Monaco, Jimmy McGriff, Wild Bill Davis, Charles Earland, Walter Wanderley, Jack McDuff, etc. For classical music there’s no question that pipe organs rule, but for jazz and lounge music give me that big B-3 sound!
 
Good Grief!!

I -never- said the "final church design didn’t meet [my] own programmatic requirements!"

I came to that church in 1982, long after the building had been completed. When I interviewed for the job, I frankly asked the music director why such a large and otherwise very well-appointed sanctuary had such a mediocre organ. His reply, verbatim, was: "You can thank the stupid architect who designed the building." And then he told me the whole story of how it had all come about.

After I had been there a year and had been doing a lot of "pissing and moaning" about how crummy the organ was, the church finally got tired of my complaining and they formed an organ committee to start looking at replacement instruments.

At that time, the pastor gave me a file of correspondence from when the church had just been completed (mid 1960s) which indicated that they were looking AT THAT TIME to get a pipe organ. There were letters from no less than a dozen organbuilding firms including Reuter, Æolian-Skinner, Möller, Wicks, Schlicker, Schantz, Austin, Casavant, and a couple of local firms.

Only one of these companies (name withheld to protect the guilty) came up with a proposal to install an organ of approx. 25 stops (about half the size it should have been), which entailed significant retrofitting of the rear chancel wall of the sanctuary with all sorts of struts and steel beams and load-bearing supports and stuff to contain a free-standing, exposed organ. That proposal was rejected out of hand because the free-standing organ case would have taken up about one-third of the space of the choir loft which was already a tight fit for their very large choir.

All the rest of the respondents said very candidly in one way or another that "there simply is not sufficient space in your sanctuary for a pipe organ of adequate resources without major architectural changes." One respondent in particular said the required retrofitting to accommodate a suitable instrument would probably cost more than the organ itself!

According to both the music director and the pastor (both of whom had been with the church since the new facility had been constructed), the architect DID know that the church wanted to get a pipe organ. However, for reasons unknown (okay, perhaps he was not STUPID but merely UNINFORMED as to the amount of real estate a large organ would require), the space he stipulated for the organ was actually two little chambers on either side of the choir loft, each one with floor space of about 6'x9' (deeper than wider, another no-no for organ pipes), and a ceiling height of about 9'.

You can't put many pipes in a space that size, but you CAN cram in quite a few speaker cabinets, hence the church forever being doomed to have an electronic organ. (The three ranks of real pipes that were included with the organ they got after I left were just stuck on the wall in front of one of the chambers. These are called "flower-pot chests" and I can imagine how totally unsuccessful the blend would be --- with the pipes exposed like that, and the rest of the (digital) sound coming from behind grillework, well, that just doesn't work. But I am sure the pipes look "real pretty.")

"And So It Goes."
 
Custom Hammond with Leslie Tallboy 31H

Some organs just break all the rules.

Here's my 1953 Hammond Chord organ, which I recently attached to the Leslie Tallboy model 31H loudspeaker. The sound is out of this world, and absolutely no comparison to how the organ sounded with it's own speakers.

Show here in my nearly 80 year old Mom, who, as you can see, really enjoys the big Leslie sound. The little Hammond chord organ thinks it's a giant now. I play it for all my guests too, and they never cease to be amazed.

Whatever organ you end up with..just make sure to have fun with it and enjoy it for all it's worth.

By the way, nobody mentioned Wurlitzer theater pipe organs. I have a huge and growing collection of rare Wurlitzer pipe organ recordings, which I just adore. The sound of a Wurlitzer is absolutely dreamy.

Happily Hammonding in Hollywood,

Bob

3-26-2007-23-17-0--bobofhollywood.jpg
 
Saville in the FLLW Hanna House

I think I should clarify a point here. The Saville installation in FLLW's Hanna House occurred in the 1950's, some twenty years after the house was built. The Hannas had wanted a pipe organ when the house was being designed, but could not afford one, even though FLLW obliged them with loft space for pipes. In 1957, the Hannas had FLLW design a substantial reconfiguration of the house, since their children were grown and gone, expanding many areas (like the dining room) into space formerly given over to a very large playroom for the children. The Saville was installed at that time, with speakers put into the space FLLW had designed for pipes. There were 120 twelve-inch speakers! In their book about their house, the Hannas state that they upgraded their piano at that time, since their former Baldwin upright was not good enough once they got the Saville. Their new piano was a Mason & Hamlin grand. Adolph Baller was a friend of the Hannas, and played the Saville for them, as did Herbert Nanney, the organist at Stanford.
 
Hammond and Leslie

The sound of ANY Hammond is vastly improved by the addition of a Leslie Speaker.

Ironically, when Don Leslie first introduced his new speaker, Laurens Hammond wanted no part of it and went out of his way to discourage Hammond users to get Leslies for their organs.

See link for an article about this that I wrote a couple of years ago.

http://www.137.com/hammond/leslie.html
 

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