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Hammond L-122 into Guitar Amp?

Posted: Sun Oct 16, 2011 6:14 pm
by warwick.hoy
So I inherited a Hammond L-122 Drawbar Organ with the house we moved into. If it were a B-3 or a CV I'd be stoked but it's just an L-122. That said it does have a little mojos all on it's own and it would be cool to have a functioning Hammond Organ in the house; but I'm not really an organist so,....I was considering gutting the amp out of it and modding it for guitar purposes.

So A) does anyone know if thing is worth anything or if I should just leave it as is?

and B) if I were to make it into a guitar amp,...does anyone have any idea how to go about that without killing myself? Links are cool. I did a search but didn't find a great deal more then discussions that said "don't kill yourself".

Re: Hammond L-122 into Guitar Amp?

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2011 3:56 am
by Schlatte
meh... I would just leave it......... I don't think you would get any "special" sounds out of it... and just having an organ around increases the coolness factor by 10³.

Re: Hammond L-122 into Guitar Amp?

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2011 3:59 am
by warwick.hoy
I plugged it in and the lower manual isn't working.

Re: Hammond L-122 into Guitar Amp?

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2011 4:13 am
by Schlatte
hmmm....... I, personally, wouldn't make an amp out of it anyways... idk... maybe look for some awesome trannys n stuff... but before you throw it away... just make the amp and post some soundclips :yay:
or repair the organ...

Re: Hammond L-122 into Guitar Amp?

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2011 11:44 am
by eatyourguitar
if it has a rotary speaker then you should jump on rehousing that bitch.

you can make a drone box out of a tonewheel organ pretty easy. run all the signals from the tonewheels into a giant passive mixer or a fixed resistor network if you want to save money. you can use a vactrol and a pwm controller to get modulation on the tonewheel motor. maybe just stick vactrols in the passive mixer to modulate volume. you can use a DIY version of a pickup winder sensor hooked up to a frequency divider to extract LFO from audio at 16 octaves down. an optical sensor on a perforated wheel would also work. these are all similar to the sensor wheel in an old mouse or the speedometer on a bike.

Re: Hammond L-122 into Guitar Amp?

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2011 3:48 pm
by Caesar
eatyourguitar wrote:if it has a rotary speaker then you should jump on rehousing that bitch.

you can make a drone box out of a tonewheel organ pretty easy. run all the signals from the tonewheels into a giant passive mixer or a fixed resistor network if you want to save money. you can use a vactrol and a pwm controller to get modulation on the tonewheel motor. maybe just stick vactrols in the passive mixer to modulate volume. you can use a DIY version of a pickup winder sensor hooked up to a frequency divider to extract LFO from audio at 16 octaves down. an optical sensor on a perforated wheel would also work. these are all similar to the sensor wheel in an old mouse or the speedometer on a bike.


Wha :?:

Re: Hammond L-122 into Guitar Amp?

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2011 3:56 pm
by warwick.hoy
I'm not quite sure I'm understanding everything in your post EYG,....

TO GOOGLE!!! (after I get home from work that is).

Re: Hammond L-122 into Guitar Amp?

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 10:20 am
by Caesar
warwick.hoy wrote:I'm not quite sure I'm understanding everything in your post EYG,....

TO GOOGLE!!! (after I get home from work that is).


I don't think he understands everything in his post. :lol:

Re: Hammond L-122 into Guitar Amp?

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:55 am
by eatyourguitar
I do understand everything I said. people often get intimidated by me and how I speak. that is unfortunate. my intention is to share ideas with like minded people, I'm not just doing it to look smart. I would love to do a project like this but your all the way over there in seattle. I love drone music and I love electronics. I would make sweet sweet love to that organ and leave it with its guts hanging out.

to elaborate a little on my first post. I'm just talking about making simple cheap mixers with pots or resistors. vactrol refers to a an LED glued to a light sensing resistor. you probably have one in a tremolo pedal. they are less than $1 to make. a frequency divider is not anything to be scared of. they are $0.32 at tayda. ok now that you have your low frequency square wave, you can feed it to your vactrol and your vactrol controls the volume. you get a "wowowowowow" sound. thats a drone for less than $5. dont hate. build something.