Yamaha PSR S550 Keyboard

[PJSprog]

Awesome work. My experience with Yamaha PSR keyboards is that they sound much better through a decent amp or PA than they do through their own speakers. Much fuller sound. Enjoy!

[DrNomis_44]

Awesome work. My experience with Yamaha PSR keyboards is that they sound much better through a decent amp or PA than they do through their own speakers. Much fuller sound. Enjoy!

I happen to have a 300 Watt Behringer K3000FX keyboard amp with an 18 inch bass speaker in it, the PSR S550 should sound good through it but I haven't tried it yet though.


One thing I noticed about the PSR S550 is how easily it could be serviced, definitely helps to have a copy of the full service manual handy.

[wazkelly]

Top job Doc.

On my wife's side of the family there is an old valve small organ that isn't working and needs a new home and wondering how hard it might be to fix considering it may date back to 1960's?

Oh, should mention I know Jack $#%t about serious electronics which only adds to the degree of difficulty taking on a project like this. Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Cheers, Waz

[DrNomis_44]

Top job Doc.

On my wife's side of the family there is an old valve small organ that isn't working and needs a new home and wondering how hard it might be to fix considering it may date back to 1960's?

Oh, should mention I know Jack $#%t about serious electronics which only adds to the degree of difficulty taking on a project like this. Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Cheers, Waz

If you can find either a service manual, or some circuit diagrams on the internet for the organ, it might turn out to be fairly easy to fix depending on what's actually wrong with it, it might just be a case of replacing a valve, a resistor, or capacitor that's gone bad in order to get it working again, hard to say, what is the organ doing and not doing?


A lot of those old 60's organs are still worth fixing, and if it's a well known brand of organ, like Hammond, it could be worth a lot of money if it's in working condition, or restored to working condition.

I wouldn't mind scoring myself a nice Hammond L-100 organ in working condition, the organ player in Uriah Heep played one, the Hammond L-100 used all valve circuitry and electrically driven tone wheels to produce it's distinctive sounds.

[corsair]

I wouldn't mind scoring myself a nice Hammond L-100 organ in working condition, the organ player in Uriah Heep played one, the Hammond L-100 used all valve circuitry and electrically driven tone wheels to produce it's distinctive sounds.

.... bearing in mind, of course, that a huge part of the Hammond sound was that Leslie speaker enclosure!! I use a simulator these days, but it's just not the same, eh!! :-)

[DrNomis_44]

.... bearing in mind, of course, that a huge part of the Hammond sound was that Leslie speaker enclosure!! I use a simulator these days, but it's just not the same, eh!! :-)

Yeah, although it is a good enough approximation, I know of at least one guy on youtube that actually made a small portable DIY Leslie speaker himself, try looking up Uncle Doug Leslie Speaker on youtube.

[dave.king1]

The tone wheel Hammonds sound glorious but my god are they heavy, I think the best combo was the B3 through a close mic'd 122 Leslie.

I'm sure Rabz will be along shortly to give a roadies view of this combo, they used to run for cover when they saw them

[corsair]

I certainly did!! Loved the sound though... still do, be it Keith Emerson, Thijs van Leer or Matthew Fisher!! My own playing is quite agricultural and not be mentioned in the same breath as the afore-mentioned players!

I use an old Alesis QS6 - which has some fabulous organ sounds -, and a rotary speaker emulator which suffices for what I do.

[DrNomis_44]

Hammond released a Digital version of the B3, called surprisingly enough the B3 II, would love to score one of them, basically they took the technology used in the original B3 and re-created it using modern digital circuitry, while still retaining all the nuances of the original B3, including the key-click and percussion.

Originally, the key-click was an unwanted by-product of the keyboard mechanism so Hammond tried removing it, but doing so also removed some of the character, so they decided to retain the key-click, the flaw became a feature that defined the sound of the Hammond Tonewheel Organ.

One feature of the mechanical Tonewheel system of generating all the notes is that the system never goes out of tune like a piano does, all the Tonewheels are driven by a synchronous electric motor.

[PJSprog]

I wouldn't mind scoring myself a nice Hammond L-100 organ in working condition, the organ player in Uriah Heep played one, ...

I used to work with Ken Hensley. When I was a Quality Jerk at St. Louis Music, he was the Artist Relations Director. Super nice guy, full of incredibly entertaining stories.