Spectrograms of the piano and the Hammond organ compared
Let’s first have a look at some individual notes played on both instruments. I played C1, C2, C3, C4, C5 and C6 on a Wilh Steinberg IQ16 upright piano and a Hammond A100 organ hooked up with a Leslie 145. The corresponding frequencies are:
C1 32,70 Hz
C2 65,41 Hz
C3 130,81 Hz
C4 261,63 Hz
C5 523,25 Hz
C6 1046,50 Hz
For the Hammond organ I used three examples
1) an 838000000 drawbar setting, typical for the left hand
2) an 888000000 drawbar setting with percussion
3) an 888000008 drawbar setting without percussion
As explained before, a spectrogram shows the amount of frequencies one hears while playing a tone, or a piece of music. The Hammond organ was built to make perfect sine waves, which don’t have overtones at all. That’s why the Hammond organ displays thick blocks and no layers above the blocks (except for the third example with the extra high drawbar added), and the piano displays a whole amount of layers with every tone. Therefore we can conclude that the piano has an enormous spread in each tone, whilst the organ has massive amounts of concentration in each tone. Playing narrow chords in the mid/low register of the organ would result in an abundance of mid/low frequencies and no overtones at all. Using higher, shorter chords that are far away from the bass will make your musical spectrum bigger and therefore more pleasant for the ears as the following examples will confirm.
Playing a standard on piano, on a Hammond the “pianistic way” and on a Hammond the “Hammond way”
The first example shows a typical Cm7-F7 progression on piano, as played in the popular jazz standard Stella by Starlight, written by Victor Young. The notes played in the example are, bottom to top: C-Eb-Bb-D-F | F-Eb-A-(D)-F. The second D is held. This spectrogram shows a regularly layered pattern, with a slight abundance in low and mid frequencies. Since the voices on the piano are in the register between F2 and F4, that’s understandable.
With exactly the same voices played on the Hammond organ, the difference is striking. The low to mid frequencies are one big red block, meaning they are oversaturating the recording, resulting in a muddy, undefined mess. The fact that there are only few frequencies from mid to high don’t help either.
When the tune is played like an organist would do it, there is still an abundance of lows, but the mids are far less saturated and there are almost no highs, which makes it possible for other band members to fill these frequencies. The sound will become more transparent and our ears will be able to distinguish the instruments better. In other words: there is much more definition in the sound.
