who here loves playing or listening to organs?

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i LOVE organs[!] of any kind, but especially theatrical wurlitzers [or their various offshoots] with all the "toy counter" sound effects and percussions. i collect organ recordings of various kinds.
the king of all organs is the "organ stop wurlitzer" at organ stop pizza in mesa, AZ-
check this out!
please talk about the organs you like to listen-to or to play.

when i was a kid i used to go up to watch the lady at my church play the organ after mass. I ended up becoming a part of the choir and played clarinet and got instrumental solos

i thought it was a fascinating spectacle to see the organist's fingers and feet flying over the manuals and pedals- a truly skilled organist, when playing a wurlitzer, can sound like he or she has 4 hands and 4 feet, due to a wurlitzer feature called "second touches" where a second set of contacts 1/8" beneath the primary key/pedal contacts can be activated with various percussions and other ranks of pipes. some pipe organists move so fast that their limbs and fingers/hands are just a blur. such skill, such a gift to have such fluent musical ability. wish i were one of 'em.

I couldn't vote because I love wurlitzer theatrical pipe organs or their offshoots, I'm not sure what hammond organs are, I hate electronic home organs and I love classical pipe organs.

Love that classic, greasy Hammond B3 sound of Deep Purple, Rainbow, Uriah Heep, Keith Emerson...

i am confused what prevented you from selecting the "i love Wurlitzers/offshoots" button? just wondering...
Hammond organs are the classic jazz and rock organ, you can recognize 'em by their drawbars above the manuals- the drawbars are selective equalizer slider bars that boost fractional frequency ranges or harmonics levels. Hammonds were the first real home organs of any quality, and fats waller [famous keyboard artist] was one of hammond's early customers. you've heard 'em before, if you can recall the unique "wowowowowow" chorusing of the leslie speaker often used with this organ.
anyways, there are quality home organs such as the Conn #653 theatre organ that you might like, as that one emulates a theatrical wurlitzer and sounds mightily convincing sufficient that george wright used one as his practice organ and produced several recordings of himself playing a Conn.
theatrical organs are considered the kings of instruments, whereas the liturgical/classical organ is considered the queen of instruments- each has their fiefdom where they command. the classical organ is prim and proper and grandly sepulchral, while the theatre organ is bright and brash and flashy and LOUD!! !

because that would have left out liturgical/classical pipe organs and I LOVE them, too!

oops

The only music in my early childhood was the church organ, so that sound permeated my bones and grew with me. Cathedrals were even better - almost worth holding still for a half-hour.

I prefer the sound of Hammonds, (but try lifting one into the back of a van...
I had a Korg M1 (old school) with both pipe organ and Hammond presets...miss it.

i remember several years ago, walking into puget sound organs [a used organ store in tacoma, washington] and seeing back in the corner a forlorn old hammond chord organ, the kind with the 2 bass pedals [for tonic and fifth- chord tone intervals, not a drink]- alas, it was inoperative, not yet repaired due to lack of parts availability. i was fascinated by its neat arrays of flat toggling buttons [organ stops of a sort] that made a neat happy "THLUP!" sound when you flipped 'em back and forth. if i had lots of money and space [they tend to go together, don't they?] and they were able to repair it, i woulda taken the thing away and given it a good home.

when i was a little kid at the department store, my late mother told me i used to always make a beeline for the organs they used to have in their music section- those were the days, when most department stores did have a music section with organs and such. i miss those days. anyways, when i got to the organ, i would always sit down on the bench and play with the keyed percussion sounds, tap the bass pedals to hear the low notes, flip the stop tabs and experiment with the different tones i could get, make chords on the accompaniment manual, play silly little tunes on the solo manual - somehow i knew at that early age that's what the different manuals were for - until my mom would grab me to go home. that's where she would "park" me while she went shopping. convenient for her and fun for me.

Someone said they didn't know what a hammond organ was.

A quick FYI: A Hammond organ is an electro-mechanical organ that uses an electro-magnetic pickup system not unlike an electric guitar to generate current from a spinning "tone wheel." The tone wheel is a grooved wheel that produces something like a sine wave. The volume of these tone wheels is determined by a set of drawbars on the organ console. The relative pitch of the drawbars corresponds somewhat to the various pipe lengths of traditional organs, making the Hammond a kind of bastardized pipe-emulator/Fourier synth. It fails miserable at making actual pipe sounds, but sounds VERY cool as a jazz/rock/blues/gospel instrument!! ! Most often the Hammond is paired with a Leslie speaker cabinet, in which there is a rotating speaker. The aural effect of the Leslie is such that it has a combined natural (not electronic) tremolo/phase shift that can be extremely fast (the characteristic Hammond B3 "sound"), gently chorused, "braked" for a stationary, straight sound, or controlled in real-time in a similar way keyboard players use the mod-wheel on a conventional synth.

With the advent of MIDI and the inclusion of even MIDI stops on traditional pipe organs, I think every pipe organ should have a "Hammond" stop to switch to a drawbar emulator!

I'm a big fan of the pipe organ as well as the Hammond B3, though I don't play pipe organ myself except when no one else is around at church. I'm thinking about writing some music for our organist, but I just haven't really had the means to seriously work on it. Perhaps that will be my project for the summer...

I'm NOT a big fan of the home organs. My stepdad got one for me when I was a teenager, but it just sounded awful, I never played it, and it quietly vanished one day. But even back in the 60's you still had analog Hammond emulators, though we use computers for that now. I'm saving up for a Vox Continental, the best-sounding "cheese" organ. I'd even go so far as to say it sounds better than the Farfisa. A good example of the Vox is "House of the Rising Sun" as performed by the Animals (INTENSE organ action). It's still a heavy instrument, but much more portable than the B3.

Why did you give up the M1? That was a GREAT keyboard!

I have the Korg Legacy Digital, which is the software version of the M1 and the Wavestation. If you don't want to go the Ebay route, it's a cheap way to get your M1 back.

reminds me of that simpsons episode where bart slips the church organist soem subversive sheet music, which the deacon announces as by "I. Ron Butterfly, In the Garden of Eden."

My father is a huge fan of the Hammond organ. In fact, I have one sitting in the room I'm currently sitting in... made about 1967, and, unfortunately, not functioning very well...