The year was 2009. The Watch, an awesome progressive rock band from Italy, was coming to Hamilton Place in Hamilton, ON, Canada to perform. Due to instrument logistical issues (cost of freight, european power supplies, etc. etc. etc) they had asked for help obtaining gear locally for the show.
“We need a Hammond L-100 organ.”
Ok then. Kijiji it was. Located this console in Simcoe, ON. It used to be in a church, but had spent time in an older couple’s house for a few years sitting. The keyboard itself was in decent physical condition, but alas, they were smokers and the poor unit was coated in cigarette stench and residue. It was cheap and all there. Home it came. It sat for some time stinking up my basement.
My friend Dave Carswell (better known as DoC) and I finally set to work cleaning the casing (cigarette residue takes awhile to come out of wood folks), clean all the connectors, tubes, drawbars, keys, you name it. The tone wheel bar had the jitters on occasion, but after an oiling, all was good. Thankfully the vibrato scanner was still 100%. We got that all cleared up and the machine ran just fine!
The band’s tech emailed me a circuit to build to allow us to connect the Hammond to an external amp (in this case my Leslie 760 preamp) post amplification. This is needed because the reverb circuit is located at this point. If you go pre-amp, you miss all that. So I got to it. This bypassed the speakers as well.
Finally mounting it into the organ. Note the volume knob. We needed to be able to adjust the output level. This worked out very well.
Finally I polished up the keyboard once again using furniture polish and car interior protectant on the plastics. That worked tremendously well.
Here the keyboard is at Hamilton Place Studio before the show. In behind the stage, the Leslie 760 was mic’ed. The organ ran like a charm for the show. After the show was done, I sold the organ to the lead singer from Teenage Fanclub, a rock band from Scotland, who needed it for touring North America. I may just see this beasty on stage once again.
This Photo by David Carswell
