Getting the "Bill Beer" tone

[thetrader]

Thanks for the history lesson!

[Papus]

Fantastic information Kon!
Jon Lord's legacy will live on for generations through the many players he has influenced.
You haven't lived until you've played a Hammond cranked through a Marshall stack!

[thetrader]

Here's a reply by Kon Zissis to a question by forum member Myth:

Myth asked:>I wanted to enquire....... if he had any insight into Bill Beer's "Hot fat and ballsy" tone generator calibration, or rather, if he had ahunch with experimentation as to what was done

Kon Replied: The only measured Bill Beer organ in my TG data spreadsheet is the "Sam's wax capped B3 or C3 ? Bill Beer chop organ formerly owned by the band Kansas."
Apart from slightly higher levels of several TG notes in the TG notes 13 to
31 range, the rest of the TG output curve looks the same as that of a typical late 1950's / early 1960's wax capped organ, so therefore I doubt that this particular organ has the "Hot fat and ballsy" tone generator calibration.

The only other information that I have read is from Al Goff who wrote that Bill Beer recalibrated the "generator mid section" to produce "huskier mids"
to complement the frequency response of the Bill Beer solid state organ preamp. Unfortunately Al Goff did not provide any further information about this.
Years ago someone with access to a Bill Beer organ told me that he would try to measure the TG output curve, but he has not followed up with this.

I have never heard a Bill Beer organ in person, but someone on the Hammond Zeni forum who once used to own a red mylar capped Bill Beer organ until it died, and who still has the Bill Beer KP-122 high power solid state biamped Leslie with the JBL E140 bass speaker and the JBL 2482 treble driver, told me that the sound of the Bill Beer organ was fat and balanced sounding throughout the whole range of the keyboard.

Several years ago I installed a JBL E140 bass speaker and a JBL 2482 treble driver in my modified Leslie 147, and later on I bought a 1970's Bill Beer
KP-122 Leslie amplifier on ebay.

I installed the Bill Beer KP-122 amplifier into my Leslie, but the sound quality was nothing special. The tonality has the typical 1970's transistor amplifier tonality with a dominantly midrangey sound without the high frequency response of a valve Leslie amplifier such as the 147 and the 122
amplifiers. The "woody warmth" of a valve amplifier was replacved by a
thick but duller sound and the organ key click and the leakage shimmer sound was practically non existent through the Bill Beer KP-122 amplifier.

I tried to experiment with the KP-122 to try to increase the treble response by unsoldering some capacitors in order to try to get the key click and the leakage shimmer, but whilst doing this with the amplifier being on, I accidentally shorted out something which cause a very loud "bang" noise which burned out the power transistors thus killing the amplifier.

Bill Beer had sanded off the transistor part numbers so therefore I do not know what are the correct spec transistors to replace the dead transistors, but I am not too concerned about this because the overall tonality of the
KP-122 was mediocre so therefore I went back to using my modified Leslie 147 valve amplifier which sounds better.

As well as that, I have other amplifiers that I could use if the Leslie 147 amplifier were to suffer some kind of catastrophic failure damage that would cost me too much when buying parts to repair it.

As well as that, the JBL 2482 treble driver is a very important part of the Bill Beer sound because the JBL 2482 has a noticeably thicker midrangey sound with a distinctive nasal "honk" compared to the stock Jensen V21 treble drivers which have a distinctive, more hollow "mid scooped"
tonality.

I like to experiment with different treble drivers in my Leslie, and at the moment I have a 100 watt RMS rated Selenium D405 treble driver with a phenolic diaphragm in my Leslie. The Selenium D405 tonality is somewhere between that of a JBL 2482 with the thick sound, and a Jensen V21 with the brighter treble, and without the particular nasal "honk" of the JBL 2482.
The selenium D405 is a very good and very "natural" sounding treble driver without the unpleasant shrillness and sterile sound of other modern treble drivers such the Hammond Suzuki 100 watt ferro fluid driver.

The Selenium D405 is a very good sounding and high power handling
replacement for the "unobtanium" JBL 2482.

In the absence of having access to a Bill Beer organ in person, our only choice to try to make sense of the Bill Beer organ sound is by listening to recordings.

Here is an example featuring a Bill Beer organ out front during the long organ solo:

Robert Cray-"The one in the middle".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frA3W6_Nxic

Thank you for your suggestions on horn drivers. Just got my Selenium and after considerable engineering it is in and sounds amazing. Of course the true test is gigging it but I can't imagine it being anything but great. This driver is so smooth and goes down so low-Wow! Thanks for taking the time to educate me. All the best!

[thetrader]

Well here is my update after a gig. First of all the Selenium/JBL driver is huge and heavy. Has tremendous midrange and really reaches down low. What I don't like about it is the top octave. It seems to have great definition everywhere else but even after a night of EQing I just could not find the sweet spot. For that Santana comping sound it nails it with full bodied notes but when you want to go up high and grab a note and hit the Leslie something is just missing. I know the frequency response is higher(7k vs. 4k) than what I've been using and maybe that's it. As always this is just my two cents. Always been curious about doing this, another thing off the bucket list, I did get a cool sticker with it!

[NittyRanks]

I just am trying to help a guy sell one of these but don't know much about it as they were so cryptic. He is retiring so any help would be appreciated.

[Drawbar Dave]

That is an early Bill Beer chop. You will probably find that it has a preamp mounted under the lid against the back of the cabinet. It will have can capacitor type plug in modules on it. I used to know someone in the US that worked on them but he stopped answering his emails and I assume he has packed it in.