Hammond Spinet organ L-100

We found it at a garage sale and brought it home with us, it is a Hammond Spinet Organ model L-100 produced from 1961–1972.


Video of Camilo playing below:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hammond L-100

The Hammond organ is an electric organ which was invented by Laurens Hammond in 1934 and manufactured by the Hammond Organ Company.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hammond L-100

The Hammond organ is an electric organ which was invented by Laurens Hammond in 1934 and manufactured by the Hammond Organ Company.[citation needed] While the Hammond organ was originally sold to churches as a lower-cost alternative to the wind-driven pipe organ, in the 1960s and 1970s, it became a standard keyboard instrument for jazz, blues, rock music and gospel music.

The original Hammond organ used additive synthesis of waveforms from harmonic series made by mechanical tonewheels which rotate in front of electromagnetic pickups. The component waveform ratios are mixed by sliding drawbars mounted above the two keyboards. Although many different models of Hammond organs were produced, the Hammond B-3 organ is the most well-known type. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the overdriven sound of B-3 (and in Europe, the C-3) organs were widely used in progressive rock bands and blues-rock groups. Although the last electromechanical Hammond organ came off the assembly line in the mid-1970s, thousands are still in daily use.[citation needed]

In the 1980s and 1990s, musicians began using electronic and digital devices to imitate the sound of the Hammond, because the vintage Hammond organ is heavy and hard to transport. By the 1990s and 2000s digital signal processing and sampling technologies allowed for better imitation of the original Hammond sound.

L-100 series

The L-100 series was produced from 1961–1972. The L-100 sounds different from the B-3 because of several changes made by Hammond engineers. At the Hammond factory, engineers found a way of removing the electrical key click sound from the L-100. Although jazz organists liked the key click sound of the B-3, Hammond engineers viewed it as a fault, and church organists tended to dislike it, because wind-driven pipe organs do not have a "click" sound at the start of every note. Hammond engineers removed the key click by raising the "output of the higher notes in the tone generator" and then cutting the "treble response in several of the amp stages".[11] As well, the L-100 had a different percussion effect, because while the B-3 uses a "push-pull tube amp with an output transformer", the L-100 has a percussion sound of longer duration. As well, the vibrato effects on the L-100 tend to be "either too much or too little and the chorus effect" lacks the "richness of the B".[12]Keith Emerson of the progressive rock band Emerson Lake & Palmer played an L-100 during concerts. In his first band "The Nice", Keith Emerson used an L-100 model as his main instrument, not only for playing but also for his wild stage antics. He also employed some of the instrument's features (self-starting motor and the built-in reverb tank) to produce a wealth of sound effects, such as wailing notes, bomb-like noises and feedback. An L-100 without a Leslie was part of punk band The Stranglers' Dave Greenfield's keyboard rig for the band's first three albums.