Dynamics

On piano, it is often said that you just push a key and then you will have sound. This is just where the game begins. Or, as Mike LeDonne puts it: “There are so many little things you got to know to get all the sounds and there are so many ways to touch those keys and for some reason, don’t ask me why, it makes a difference. People keep saying that: it’s just a key and it goes to a hammer that goes up and hits a string. Not true!”¹

Dynamics in piano playing rely on where your body is positioned to distribute the needed weight, how much arm weight your are using by moving your wrist down or up a bit and how much finger action you are using. In a series of two videos, concert pianist and teacher Graham Fitch describes very clearly how the wrist and fingers contribute to your piano sound.²³ In another series, Fitch explains many things about loud and soft playing.⁴⁵

For playing loud:

- sense the bottom of the keybed

- effort before sensing the bottom of the keybed, release immediately afterwards

- instead of landing from a height, keep your fingers on the key and use your upper body as if you are pushing back

- don’t play everything equally loud, because your bass will override everything

- emphasize your top notes

- start with the sustain pedal sound for maximum resonance, but don’t drown your notes by keeping the pedal down

For playing soft:

- connect to the keybed to avoid a thin, hollow sound and, even worse, missing notes

- while being in contact with the keybed, don’t push

- after a while you feel like being glued to the bottom of the keybed

- practice first without the pedal, then add just a little bit

- in case a bass note has to stay there for a few bars, keep the pedal down

There are of course many more factors that influence the piano sound, like usage of the left pedal (una corda) or raising the fingers for extra clarity (opinions are divided on this subject). Bottom line is that the piano player makes the sound by using the body. The hammond organ’s sound is made by the organist tweaking knobs and levers, and the expression pedal. I will go through these knobs and levers and explain their influence on dynamics while playing the organ, starting with the expression pedal.

In the section Technical differences between the piano and the Hammond organ, I have explained how a circuit of nine electric switches is completed when you press a key. As a logical consequence the keys are non-touch sensitive. No matter how much arm weight or finger action you put in, you will get the same volume striking the keys. To solve this dynamic problem, every Hammond organ is equipped with an expression pedal, which you operate with your right foot.

About the expression pedal, Mike LeDonne says:

“You get expression with that pedal by backing off the note or coming up for dynamics. There’s a beautiful thing that happens on Hammond when you back off the note. That’s why some organ players pump on all four beats. When something pretty happens and you hit the note and back it off…”

BW: “You get more attack.”

MLD: “Yeah, attack and it does something with the tone of the organ when you back off the expression. It doesn’t just deal with volume. It gives you more bass and more highs when you pump the volume up and it takes bass and highs down when you back it off. So for instance, when you have all the drawbars out and you want to go for a big sound, you don’t put that pedal up because people are gonna have their ears blown out. If you hit that sound, back off a bit and when you back off a bit, it gets a more pretty sound.“⁶

Tony Monaco however warns the Hammond organ student to not use the expression pedal on every beat, because it will give you this “wooey” sound that is in the way of defining a good time feel.⁷ So the expression pedal works as a main switch with an effect on the whole instrument, which you can adjust on a continuous scale. Switches that do not have an effect on the whole instrument, but on parts of it, are coming up next. Like levers that cannot be mentioned enough times: the drawbars.

Drawbars have an obvious effect on dynamics. With a drawbar setting of 888888888 you will get way more sound than with a setting like 111111111. Where the expression pedal turns out to be more and just a volume slider, the drawbars have an enormous influence on the timbre of the organ, not just the volume. Part of those timbre differences can be found in the Spectrogram section.

It is plain to see why the timbre changes so much. If we look back for a moment to the fact that you can adjust what happens behind those nine electric switches underneath your key, and that you can change all the available sine waves underneath one key to your heart’s desire, the Hammond organ really is your synthesizer from the good old days. A synthesizer that lends itself for orchestration, just like the piano. “When you get into orchestrating the piano, you hear Ahmad Jamal, McCoy Tyner or Herbie or Bill Evans. You hear them really orchestrating all these things. You can do that to the end degree on organ. There are so many different sounds and little subtle things. When you start manipulating these drawbars. The biggest mistake that pianists make is that they only listen to Larry Young and they only play that one sound. They only want to sound like the most modern thing that’s happening and in a lot of that modern stuff they don’t switch sounds. You don’t hear guys playing the Shirley Scott sound, or the Wild Bill Davis sound. The Don Patterson big full organ sound.“⁸

So you are in this situation where you have all your top manual’s drawbars pulled out and you want to raise the energy even more. That is where the Leslie switch comes in. This switch can be set to chorale or tremolo, which makes the rotors of your Leslie speaker spin at a slow or fast speed. Some organs have a Leslie switch that can stop the rotors from spinning. Switching from slow to fast gives the sound an accelerating effect, since it takes time for the rotors to speed up. You can feel the energy level rising even more. Switching it back to slow will turn the engine back to the slow speed, but those rotors are still spinning fast. It takes time to get them back to the engine’s speed, which results in a slowing down sensation. Pull the drawbars back in and the instrument tames down.

The percussion section has four buttons. Percussion is experienced by the listener as a high pitched click and is assigned to preset key B of the upper manual.⁹ No other preset key is linked to the percussion function. Percussion can be on or off, fast or slow, loud or soft (loud doesn’t increase the percussion volume, it decreases the volume of the tone), and a high 5^th (button says 3^rd) or slightly less high octave (button says 2^nd). When playing with the percussion on, it only functions for each note if you don’t play legato. As soon as you connect the notes, percussion disappears until you leave even the slightest space between two notes.

To our top left we have three buttons and a turning knob, from left to right: Volume (soft/normal), Vibrato Swell (on/off), Vibrato Great (on/off) and Vibrato and Chorus (C1, V1, C2, V2, C3 and V3). While some of these buttons are more used than others – the volume button basically stays on normal, unless you need to practice more softly and the turning knob is mostly set to C3 – you would not expect these buttons to have influence on the dynamics. However, they have. Swell refers to the upper manual and Great to the lower one and turning vibrato on will send the signal through the organ’s vibrato scanner, resulting in a swirly effect and added bass, which counts especially for Vibrato Great.

Finally we get to our reverse coloured keys at the left side of the keyboard, called preset keys. Look at the set of drawbars belonging to the manual you want to change the sound from. The two left drawbar sets belong to the Swell (upper manual) and the two right drawbar sets belong to the Great (lower manual). Preset key A# activates the left set of nine drawbars and preset key B activates the right set of nine drawbars. The middle two drawbars, belonging to the pedals, have no preset key assigned to them. All other preset keys can be changed on the preset panel that sits inside the organ. The organs which have preset panels came with a card with instructions on how to change the presets, and which had a spreadsheet on which one could note the currently wired-up preset settings.¹⁰

“What do preset keys have to do with dynamics?” you might think. Well, because drawbars have a huge influence on dynamics, so do preset keys since you assign softer, more mellow or louder, brighter settings to them. Preset keys give you a much quicker access to dynamics than changing drawbar settings, but do have their limits. Unless you really want to open up the organ and meddle with that preset panel. Instead of that, let us move forward to a topic in music which is forgotten too many times.

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