[sdiy] 60s organ sound

[WeAreAs1 at aol.com]

In a message dated 12/16/04 2:14:20 PM, david.k.cornutt at boeing.com writes:

<< While we're on the subject, were there actually

Farfisas that had pitch bend?  If so, how did

it work?  I remember Pat Travers saying once that

he played the organ solo on "Crash and Burn" on

a Farfisa, and that solo has some obvious pitch

bends.  Then again, Travers was full of sh** most

of the time, and to me it kind of sounds like a

Prophet-5 organ patch.   >>

Some of the 1970's-era Farfisas had a semi-useless feature called "Slalom", 
which was a kind of triggerable pitch bend.  The Slalom feature had a depth 
control (or maybe it was an attack time control?).  They had a cute little 
picture of a snow skier right next to the Slalom control.  When Slalom was turned 
on, when you played a key or keys, the pitch of the notes would drop, then slide 
back up to pitch.  It was intended, I think, to sound sort of like a Hawaiian 
steel guitar player, although it really just sounded kind of weird -- maybe 
like a very drunken Hawaiian steel player, at best.  

I'm pretty sure it was just a single-trigger effect that acted globally on 
all currently played notes (that is, it wouldn't retrigger the effect until you 
released all held notes).  I never saw a Farfisa that had an actual pitch bend 
knob or lever, although some did have a fine-tuning knob, which could 
probably have been modified to work a wider-range pitch bender.  The Slalom feature 
started appearing in Farfisas after the company switched over to a top-octave 
divider tone generation system (earlier 1960's Farfisas had individually 
tunable oscillators for each of the twelve master pitches).  With top-octave divider 
systems, it's a lot easier to implement things like pitch bend and master 
tuning controls.  If you search the web for "Farfisa VIP255", you'll find more 
info on the Slalom feature.

Michael Bacich

PS -- My spell checker insists that I spell "Farfisas" as "Pharisees".  Hmmm, 
does it know something that I don't?