Getting the "Bill Beer" tone

[Brendon Wright]

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

[Wes]

I wonder why Kon doesn't post here. He is one of the most thoughtful Hammond tinkerers to have ever committed his thoughts to electrons.

[Brendon Wright]

Yeh, I know, eh!

He used to post over on Hammond Zone all the time but it was an email based forum, so every man and his dog (including me) emailed him directly with their Hammond difficulties instead of posting to the forum.
He found himself spending days answering emails (!) I guess that didn't tickle his fancy so he went into stealth mode.

Ahem, "The Greek Ghost!"

[Guest]

Since BB changed the amplification tube circuits with transistor ones, the path of getting that sound starts there. The organ will then sound differently and I would recalibrate the tone generator to the levels at amp output as in the B3 service manual which is readily available.

[Wes]

Hee hee. I have been having a conversation with Kon for a little over a year on generator measurement now. I try not to email him too often, he sends very detailed replies and I'm sure each one takes at least a half hour out of his day! His observations thus far have been both astute and extremely accurate. I re-analyzed a bunch of his data recently, and after about 10 hours of work with a spreadsheet, polynomial regressions, charts, etc .... I came up with exactly the same results. Which is great! Results confirmation is one of the final steps in academic scientific circles. He has already done the equivalent of publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

- - - Updated - - -

Boyan - interesting hypothesis - that may be, in fact, how Bill arrived at his calibration scheme. Or he may have created his own version of the chart, by measuring an organ he felt was particularly balls.

[Myth]

Thanks again for asking him, Brendon.

[Papus]

Sounds like Bill Beer is to Hammonds as Alexander Dumble is to guitar amps, and Klon is to guitar pedals....... ultra-secretive shenanigans such as sanding off the part numbers, or covering the circuit boards with black goo which is impossible to remove without destroying the boards.
In my experience some of those types of characters are one-trick ponies, and the trick usually turns out to be rather mundane when finally revealed.

[Myth]

Unfortunately I missed a great opportunity on a certain auction site to purchase the high frequency 2482 driver, should have pulled the trigger on the auction yesterday. Is the driver that rare? Is there a piece of equipment that would contain this driver?

- - - Updated - - -

Hee hee. I have been having a conversation with Kon for a little over a year on generator measurement now. I try not to email him too often, he sends very detailed replies and I'm sure each one takes at least a half hour out of his day! His observations thus far have been both astute and extremely accurate. I re-analyzed a bunch of his data recently, and after about 10 hours of work with a spreadsheet, polynomial regressions, charts, etc .... I came up with exactly the same results. Which is great! Results confirmation is one of the final steps in academic scientific circles. He has already done the equivalent of publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

- - - Updated - - -

Boyan - interesting hypothesis - that may be, in fact, how Bill arrived at his calibration scheme. Or he may have created his own version of the chart, by measuring an organ he felt was particularly balls.

I read it somewhere that indeed, Bill Beer had taken the best few organs, and made notes on their TG setup. I'd too be really interested in seeing how the TG differed with his modifications!

- - - Updated - - -

Sounds like Bill Beer is to Hammonds as Alexander Dumble is to guitar amps, and Klon is to guitar pedals....... ultra-secretive shenanigans such as sanding off the part numbers, or covering the circuit boards with black goo which is impossible to remove without destroying the boards.
In my experience some of those types of characters are one-trick ponies, and the trick usually turns out to be rather mundane when finally revealed.

I just wish that like Dumble, there existed many fairly accurate clones of the product. I suppose the market for organs is much smaller than Hammond organs for sure. Joe Bonamassa had a very nice sounding Dumble clone in his earlier days

[Wes]

Here's a couple of 2482s -- http://www.canuckaudiomart.com/detai...82-mid-driver/ ... Remember that $1 CAD = ~ $0.70US

Personally, I would save my money. If you need replacement drivers, look at offerings from Atlas these days.

[Myth]

Thank you Wes for keeping an eye out. This auction says it is for a mid driver. Does the leslie need a high frequency or treble driver, or does the mid driver work the same?

Is there a comparable Atlas?

[Analog]

The 2482 is part of the tone. Also the generator curve and the tonality of the Bill Beer preamp in the organ. Nothing matches the bell-like 2482.

[Wes]

The JBL 2842 is a midrange driver, and its specs indicates that it can handle the operating frequencies of a Leslie speaker. The Leslie speaker is crossed over at 800Hz, and the highest tone from a Hammond generator is a little over 6kHz.

I would expect the JBL 2842 to sound pretty bad in a stock organ and Leslie. The Atlas PD-60 will probably sound almost as bad. Both these drivers are far more powerful with better high-end reproduction than the stock drivers.

Wes

[MihevicB3]

. . . I have been having a conversation with Kon for a little over a year on generator measurement now. I try not to email him too often, he sends very detailed replies and I'm sure each one takes at least a half hour out of his day! His observations thus far have been both astute and extremely accurate. I re-analyzed a bunch of his data recently, and after about 10 hours of work with a spreadsheet, polynomial regressions, charts, etc .... I came up with exactly the same results. . . .

Hi Wes,

I have a lot of Kon’s Spreadsheet files, the latest Spreadsheet file I have is:
KonsData-20111118.xls. Is there a later one he made?

There are many worksheets and so much data. There is the “Alan Young Data”, “1935 to 1940 Data”, “1946 to 1956 Data”, “1960-1970 Data”, etc., etc. Just wondered what is considered the “Standard” from all of Kon’s data if someone was to recalibrate a TG from scratch?

John M.

[Brendon Wright]

The last one I got was May 2010. You're a good year and a half up on me!

[Wes]

I think mine is from 2013. :)

I have not tried it yet, but I will be trying the following soon:

1 - Measure TG's current calibration
2 - Take mean (average value) of tones 13-35 in mVpp Call this M.
3 - use S = M/10.58 -- this should be very close to 1 unless your meter is way out
4 - set tones 13 through along the curve you select from my math or Kon's drawings. Multiply the value you use from the graph by S. The purpose of S is to normalize measurements across meters. As I said, it should be very close to 1, so shouldn't really be necessary
5 - my math is taken by analyzing a variety of red-cap organs and eliminating those with weird curves, as well as eggregious outliers, then normalizing them so that tones 13-35 all had the same mean. My curve is f(x)=25.930256292489823-1.205076082033713x+0.02761832185972664x^2-0.00016949175642351404x^3 where x is the tone number. So Sf(x) would be what I would set the tone to.

Here is my curve; you can see it's virtually identical to Kon's late 60s curve (which would be redcap organs) and very similar to the late 50s curve.



So, "what is standard"? I dunno. Kon has pointed out before that the calibration has changed throughout the years; some of the differences appear to be on purpose, some appear to be, perhaps, the result of poorly-calibrated factory calibration machinery. For example, tones around 39-45 seem to have a "bump" in many redcap organs, including my R100 generator. One hypothesis is that the calibration machinery was out of whack for awhile, or perhaps there was something around those tones that made it easy for the operator to screw up. Similarly, later generators seem really badly calibrated after tone 75 or so. Again, my R100 is a prime example here. The graph looks like somebody plotted it with a shotgun loaded with birdshot.

Wes