Hammond X5

Here is the portable Hammond organ made in the early seventies. I seem to recall nowhere on the organ could I find a reference to the model being X5, the serial number plate just gave the usual data - I was relying upon the salesman in the shop to tell the truth! But wait! I've found an advert confirming that this really IS an X5!!

Looking under the hood you'll find it has discrete transistor circuits with a few integrated circuits making up the frequency divider, lots of passive components (resistors, capacitors) making up the filters, a collection of printed circuit boards and plenty interconnecting wiring looms. Look closer and you will see it's Made In Japan.

photo of Hammond X5 organ

It dismantles into smaller parts the two chrome side rails detach but are held together by a large folding plank at the rear, the foot-pedal unit comes away essentially leaving 3 parts to carry.
The organ part alone is quite heavy, note the chrome bumper just in front of the lower manual. This is really the carrying handle, it needs to be that size because it's quite a beast to lift particularly on your own.

Knobs & Buttons

My memory of this instrument has now faded but.. 7 drawbars for the lower manual, 1 for the pedals 9 for the upper manual.

Below that there are buttons:-

Percussion on-off 2nd 3rd
Vibrato on-off fast-slow
Tremolo on-off fast-slow deep-not so deep
Leslie stop-start slow-fast

Over on the right hand side you will find buttons and knobs for:-

Reverb level setting
Foot pedal octave
Hard or soft footpedal sound (I think)
And something else which I can't remember

The knobs:-

Volume
Tone control
Something else, vib/trem speed I think

760 Leslie

The 760 Leslie is the recommended speaker for the X5 which is another beast in itself. It's big and bulky, about 5 foot tall, 3 foot 6 inches wide by about 3 foot deep it comes with two sturdy carrying handles on opposing sides of the cabinet and has castors built in - fortunately it's not too heavy. The cabinet is mostly empty in fact there is only stuff inside where you see the gold coloured grilles.

Leslie 760 speaker cabinet The top grille lets the sound out of the top spinning horns, the lower grille lets the sound out of the lower spinning speaker baffle. A compact 60 Watt transistor amplifier sits beside the lower rotor on the bottom of the enclosure.

The horn and woofer look to be the same units as used in 145 & 122 series of Leslies, but of course the amplifier is completely different. Note that it uses an interconnecting cable with 11-pin connectors (145/122 use 6 pin).

It's not much to look at in fact the woman of the house would most certainty want it removed from sight. I wouldn't blame her - it's a dull utilitarian design made to withstand the rigours of being transported from gig to gig.

Yes Yes Yes but what does it sound like?

If you want that big dirty Hammond sound as heard on a lot of say Deep Purple, Focus, Argent or any other progressive rock band then the answer is this is not for you. No matter how I tried it would not sound big and grunty.

I fed the signal through distortion pedals, valve amplifiers everything I could think of until I came to the conclusion - this instrument is will not produce that big grunty sound.
Phew! OK what does it do? yes it does sound like a Hammond, it does have that tone in fact it's quite a clear and defined tone. The Leslie is very clear, the delights were the three speeds of the rotors, even with the rotors stopped it was like the calm before the storm because when you switched the rotors on it was bliss. The clear sound of the transistor amplifier and I assume, the physical height of the horns made that phasing room filling swirly sound really exciting. The reverb was a surprise too, it's only a spring unit but it had such a good tone.
I tried the organ out on a recording session of Get Ready that soul classic and it really made the track with its uplifting soaring sound.

Things to note is that the keyboard is only three and a half octaves so groovy low notes are out. It does take a little getting used to but the guy in the shop played the thing so much like Jimmy Smith it was untrue - sure he was using the footpedals he proved it could be done.

Money and bits that drop off

Indeed, a word of warning that some of the integrated circuits used in this organ are no longer available. My example would loose the Eb note when warmed up - I traced it to a faulty frequency divider chip which of course is no longer available. My solution was to build a small add-on circuit that used the existing chip's output and boosted it.
A lot of the buttons or tabs were not working properly but a dismantle and clean up session restored full operation.

Gig it?

Well... I did the once, we squeezed the whole lot into an estate type car - there was very little room left for us!
The organ is a lump to carry because of its size it ends up being at an awkward height, the footpedals have lots of pokey out bits which tend to catch on everything and the steel chrome stand keeps flopping about. Quite a handful.
It's a bit of a monster to set up at the gig, there's lots of lifting and connecting to do - probably too much for one guy to do on a regular basis particularly if you have other keyboards to set up too.
The Leslie's just a big lump - awkward but not too much of a problem.

So we humped the whole thing into the gig and away I went. The size of the venue swamped the Leslie and made it look quite small - the volume level was good in fact it took the drummer's head off. One problem was I lost the sound halfway through the gig - I searched for faulty connectors, loose wires etc. it turned out that I'd trod on the swell pedal shutting off the volume!