I may have written about pulling apart organs in the past but today I pulled apart the oldest electronic one I had and through the progression of the ones I have demo’d, as in demolished, I’ve ended up learning far more about humanity and our relationship with technologies than I’d ever care to know.
The first one was an italian job from the seventies, late I’d surmise from the chips used, and this one was on the side of the road with the amp and power supply already cut out so just removing the keys and associated electronics for salvage made this one easy to rip apart. I mean there wasn’t really much incentive to rebuild it into something because the research would’ve been too much to find out what was missing. Or at least that was the excuse I gave myself as I mined it for the rare IC’s like LM13600 and LM13700’s. One really needs to understand the architecture of these things to understand whats going on and the more electronic they are the harder they are, without schematics, to understand whats going on.
Then, in quick succession I pulled apart a Baldwin funmachine and a crossover era Hammond. These were both of a style where the tone generation is done in specific monolithic, meaning big I suppose, chips whereas the Italian job was more old school in that alot of the functions were fulfilled by groups of discrete components. But I did get a little further along in understanding the architecture the organ makers used. Suffice to say these two examples still had a pile of usable wire, caps, transistors and springs, screws, grommets etc that are of great interest to anyone contemplating the building of instruments.
But today I got into the big old Gulbransen from the early sixties or late fifties though I’m pretty sure it was the 60’s as it had transistors and tubes. I basically got it not working for the tube amp simply because output transformers and power transformers are hard to get these days. Not so hard if one lives in America but these babies are heavy so they are expensive to ship.
Anyways, the tube amp aside, this thing was an absolute wonder to pull apart. The architecture was obvious as most of the signal logic was mechanical and the things they did to acheive switching etc could never be done today unless we had budgets akin to Nasa.
The way these babies work is by having a whole bunch of tone generators. Each note has about 8-9 octaves on its board and the various stops, what they call the instrument or sound choices, switch in the base note plus various other notes, at specific amplitudes below the level of the base note, as harmonics plus maybe some pink or white noise on attack or sustain. So you’ve got about about 24 notes, or two octaves, of base notes and each note is replicated in octaves up about 8 times which gives you about 200 notes to combine in different ways to acheive the sound you want. The mechanical setups to acheive this are such that I would work my whole life to build just one organ and need a really comprehensive workshop of machines to acheive this.
You can look at your average Casio that you can buy at the shop tomorrow and upon opening it up theres almost no mechanical action and even where there is its all been autocadded so we can’t draw any real connection between ourselves and our abilities and view this casio as something we could contemplate building. But the Gulbransen from the 60’s could be made in the workshop out back. Given the Raw materials were available, and they mostly still are, and the basic discretes like transistors and caps and resistors were also available, which they still are, then 90% of the work to build the Gulbransen could be done in a backyard workshop… but it would take years to do for one person!
(Okay, it’s been a week or two since I wrote the above, so I’ll quickly sum it up and publish so I can get onto other things I have or haven’t been doing.)
I suppose what came accross in this spasm of demo’ing was that the people of earlier generations had so much better stuff than we had. Even the sh#t stuff was almost exclusively handmade and the materials used were closer to their raw state and I can’t help thinking, I’ve seen it in artworks and preloved antiques etc, that that human element combined with the rawness of the materials ended up with things that have ended up being able to last a long time and even be rebuilt over and over. Even if we stop loving the stuff for it’s anachronistic behaviours it still seems to retain a semblance of determination to last and I think that may come down to the underlying hopes that were built into things.
Now the machines just spit things out and the labour forces are hankering for what we are discovering is an empty dream as the weather shifts it’s focus and the Ice sheets drop into the Oceans.
We may think we have more options and easy ways to work our new stuff but does it have the real underlying hopefullness I think we really need.
Suffice to say I am happier with stuff made that I can replicate myself and have a chance, without many years of specialised training, of understanding that is also somewhat dangerous and unheeding of my ignorance… than I am of using and enjoying something that is so beyond my capabilities as to be nothing but mystery… Except for my Boss Looper and Delay pedals.
That said I’d envisage a mix of 80% stuff that wholesome and understanbly fixable and modifiable and 20% mysterious otherworldly factory spat out super techno.
Just like my music I suppose.