[sdiy] 60s organ sound

[Antti Pitkämäki]

Michael Bacich wrote:

>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
...
>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

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the Farfisa Professional Duo had a "slalom 
pedal", that is, a pitch bend foot pedal which bends the sound an octave. I 
think it worked so that it was possible to permanently set the organ to play 
an octave lower.

Some Led Zeppelin song features some Farfisa VIP organ, which is used to 
make those weird pitch bend chords. The song is from the LP "Houses of the 
Holy"... Hmm, maybe it's "the Dancing Days" or something like that. I'm not 
at home now so I can't check it.

A while ago somebody mentioned on the Combo Organ discussion group that once 
he tried to do some modification to his Farfisa Compact's vibrato, and ended 
with a pitch bend knob that bended the sound like several octaves.

But guess what's one of the weirdest feature found from a combo organ? My 
Yamaha YC-25D has th possibility to introduce vibrato and/or wah wah by 
"waggling" the keys sideways ;) Unfortunately the effect needs a lamp, and 
the lamp from my organ is burned and I've been too lazy to put a new one 
there. Well, someday...

Antti Pitkämäki

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