Hammond H-100 Series

This is a very old tonewheel Hammond. No software.

This organ has the same size keyboard as a Hammond B HOWEVER the bass goes all the way down so you get another half octave of bottom before hitting the preset stops.

This means you can rock on C and add growl without using pedals.

The top octave folds back.

The top drawbars have eleven bars. That's a B plus two more on the top of the range. One of the extra bars sounds out of tune like the extra spot bar on the old M2 but it can give a really vintage feel if you just play through it.

They say Hammonds are not touch sensitive but anybody who plays through a P.A. knows they are. A Hammond is different, tickled or clunked.The H gets key click with age just like all the rest. It also has imitation key click which isn't convincing on the console but sounds like the real thing through an external amp with valves.
The touch on an H is different to a B. More springy and the contacts click in quicker.The H is the baubles for reggae and big dancehall sustain but if you want to sound like a clunky old B then buy a B.
Push ALL the vibrato section down for a Greg Rollie Santana sound. You can change tones by deselecting one tab at a time.
The Celeste or imitation slow Leslie has to be caught as it comes around just like a real Leslie but remember you can't watch for the horn passing the mike.
The Harp makes a great Stranglers sound. The percussion section has some familiar sounds and some that seem useless until you try them on the bass octave. There is a tab to leave percussion tone on all the time. This means you play with a preset plus drawbars.

It is hard to get all new valves. It is IMPOSSIBLE to change a key on the bottom manual unless you have a circus acrobat with a reverse yankee screwdriver and a degree in mirrors.
There are three channels to go wrong but equally thats three channels for backup if one starts to get a bit sparkey.
The insides have the usual "fix it with an elastic band and some chewing gum" Hammond standard ruggedness but there are a lot more bits in there so remember what went where as you go in so you can put it back properly as you leave.
You won't want to gig this organ. The roadies would as for danger money and extra porridge just to lift it across the room.

Everybody wants a B. That makes an H very easy to afford. It also makes the parts hard to get. The usual bits like drawbars and keys and tabs are straightforward but some of the valves are expensive. If your percussion gets weak then you will have a real trek trying to get help because it is very complex. The vibrato and chorus are wonderful, probably the best but you can't swap them about with other models.An H gives you an awful lot for not very much money but you may not always have everything working at once unless you can learn how to do a bit on your own.

I have owned an M2 and M3 and A100 and a GT7 and I have a first version CX3 to carry for practices.
The H does it all but you have to work at it. Its not a clone and it won't sound like a B or clunk like an M unless you find those tones for yourself. The action takes some getting used to.
The default sounds are familiar to everyone as elevator Hammond just like a B gives you Butlins.
I can get Brian Auger and Pink Floyd, the Stranglers, Santana, Steve Winwood, LLoyd Charmers, Studio One, Culture, Ethiopians and Al Greene but it sings best with sustain chords, Afterglow for instance.
It has three channels, I take the trebles out through a Fender silveface and the bass through a big old Leslie when I want to annoy the neighbours.

Turn it on with the single switch (Hammond had gotten away from the old separate start and run motors by the time they made the H series), hit one of the reverse colored preset keys on the left end of each manual, wait a few seconds for the tubes to warm up, and you're playing! For nonstandard tone combinations there are two sets of drawbars for each manual, one set selected by the A# preset key and the other by the B preset key (which also actuates the percussion features.) I'm knocking off a point here because it might take you a bit to figure out how it works if you're unfamiliar with Hammonds. The guy I bought mine from didn't know, and he was puzzled that "It wouldn't play until I started hitting keys for a while, then it did." (He finally activated a preset key.) The various tablets for the percussion, rhythm, vibrato & celeste, reverb, etc. are pretty self-explanatory and easily figured out by trying them. The pedals are only actuated by a set of 4 drawbars. The left two are for "16' tones" and the right two are for "8' tones," the brown ones being "mellow" with the fundamental frequencies emphasized, and the right two being "bright," with more higher harmonics included. This model has a "string bass" feature with variable levels of sustain after releasing the pedals.

The H-100 series have complete polyphony of the 61 keys on each manual and the 25 pedal keys. (Some of the other late Hammond models had a pedal board that was monophonic.) The action is light and fast. That's a Hammond trademark, which made glissandos very popular in Hammond music. This model has "diving board" keys, which means that you have to do the glisses from on top of the keys, not along the front edge as is commonly done with the older "waterfall" keys. But it's easily doable if you remember this.

The "percussion" feature of this model is different from the -3 series (B-3, C-3, A-100, & M-3) in that instead of selecting the second or third harmonic for the "percussion" attack, you select from a series of tabs or combinations of tabs that select preset combinations of tonewheel sounds labelled with various instrument names: Chimes, Glock., Guitar, Marimba, Xylophone, & Banjo. The "Fast and "Slow" decay settings of the -3 series are gone. What's left is the "Fast" decay with a "Reiterate" tab, with a variable rate control. This will keep retriggering the percussion note as long as you hold down the key. For instance, it'll sound somewhat like tremolo-picking a note on a banjo along with the organ sound if "Banjo" is selected as the percussion voice. The default percussion setting is to trigger each new note (and any others already held down) when any new key is pressed. Selecting the "touch sensitivity" tab makes it act like -3 percussion, only triggering when all keys are released before a new one is pressed, with no percussion in legato playing. There's also a "second voice" tab, which keeps the percussion note playing continuously, not decaying after the attack.

The "rhythm" effect of this organ is rather primitive. You can select a "brush" sound to play with either or both manuals, and a "cymbal" sound to play with the pedals. This is a white noise generator gated like the "percussion" to play when a key is depressed, decaying away at a fixed rate. There's a control for the brush & cymbal volume. There is no auto-generated rhythm.

The "harp sustain" effect is somewhat like the sustain pedal on a piano. Instead of the notes instantly cutting off on releasing the keys, when this tab is selected, a limited set of harmonics decays slowly. This was an expensive addition, with a large board in the back of the organ having a separate gated transistor amplifier for each frequency used.

The pedals' "String Bass" effect is similar, but it was achieved by latching the pedal switch down with a solenoid so that when the pedal is released the sound is slowly decayed by a gated circuit. When a new pedal is pressed, the current to the solenoids is insufficient to latch two of them at the same time so the pedal that's not being held down is released. This system has an adjustment that may need to be tweaked if it's not acting right.

The vibrato system is more complex than earlier ones, in that the scanner has two rotors 180? out of phase. As with earlier Hammond vibrato scanners, the rotor is passing over a series of capacitors that act as switches tapping into various points along a delay line to produce phase shifting that has the effect of frequency modulation. It was an attempt to make the Leslie rotary speaker sound electronically. The dual vibrato system, with separate stereo amplifiers, better achieves a Leslie-like sound as one channel's pitch is going down while the other channel's pitch is going back up in opposite phase.

The "Celeste" effect is similar, but derived from a separate scanner driven by a belt at a much slower speed. Makes a very "churchy" sound, the name being taken from the "celeste" voices of pipe organs that use slightly out-of-tune pipes playing together to make a slow beat frequency effect

This organ sounds good with any kind of music you'd play on a Hammond. It has two added drawbars for the upper manual, one with a mix of the 7th and 9th harmonics, the other a mix of the 10th and 12th harmonics. That was done for better emulation of pipe organ and string sounds. The lower manual only has the added 7th and 9th harmonic drawbar.

The percussion sounds are a bit different from the -3 series, being more complex. Otherwise, any sounds producible by the -3 series can be selected with this one, also. The vibrato is superior to the -3, and really it serves as a pretty good substitute for a Leslie except that it can't be accelerated and decelrated as a Leslie can; it's either fast or slow.

Hammonds are touch sensitive in that the contacts under a key don't all make contact at once. There's no velocity sensitivity. As the other reviewer noted, the brush and cymbal effects are cheesy, but in the mid '60s, this was high-tech stuff!

These things were built from about 1965-70. That ought to tell you something. Anything this complex and old can develop problems. Because this is much more complex than, say, a B-3. there are more things to go wrong. For that reason they had a reputation when they were new of needing more service. Of course, there's been some "debugging" over time of the ones that were maintained.

Any tonewheel Hammond needs annual oiling of the tone generator mechanism. The instructions are in the back of the organ. Hammond oil or modern substitutes can be bought from a number of suppliers. A number of light oils should work well. I use ISO 22 viscosity grade spindle oil in mine. (That's made for lubricating lathes and other rotating machinery.)

Earlier Hammonds used common radio type vacuum tubes that are still readily available. This model uses several types of tubes that were new in the '60s, intended for high-end audio equipment, and these tubes are hard to find and expensive now. It contains a total of 21 tubes on three separate metal chassis, along with a bunch of discrete-transistor printed circuit boards. Along with a number of the standard 12AX7 and 12AU7 types, it uses a 7247 (12DW7, ECC832) as the reverb driver, an EF86 (no substitute) as the reverb recovery tube, and in the three power amps the combined voltage amplifier/phase inverter is a 7199. Sovtek has recently made these, but they're not cheap. NOS ones are very expensive. The 7247s and EF86s have also been made recently by the Russians and Serbians, but I believe they're out of production at present. The 6BQ5/EL84s in the two treble amps are commonplace, but the 7591s in the bass amp are another matter. Circa 1990 an Asian dealer bought up all the available 7591s in the U.S., and for years people have been modding their amps to use other tubes like 6L6s with less than stellar results. Recently, however, a true 7591 plug-in replacement is being made by Electro-Harmonix, and another has just been brought out by JJ. (Stay away from the Sovtek 7591XYZ, which is a repinned 6L6 that requires circuit modification.) The two rectifier tubes are 5AR4/GZ34s, which are avaialble from a number of sources today.

Hammonds are set up to run their tubes fairly easily, and they last a long time, but I'd suggest stocking up on some spares of the uncommon types.

The old Hammond company went under in the early '80s. Hammond-Suzuki owns the name, but won't help you with the old organs. There are Hammond techs scattered around the country, but they mainly work on the -3 series and don't like messing with the complex H-100s. You're going to have to learn to maintain and fix it yourself. (IMO) Fortuanately, manuals are available and there are great learning resources on the Web for Hammonds, with lots of friendly folks willing to offer helpful advice. So if you don't mind diving in and tinkering, this is for you! (It is a bit daunting due to all the stuff crammed "under the hood," rather like a modern car engine!)

I think it's a fantastic value! Have you looked at what B-3s, C-3s and A-100s are going for lately? This really is a more capable instrument IMO than any of those. (Back in the day it sold for $3650 when a B-3 went for $2745.) Nothing sounds like a genuine tonewheel Hammond with tubes in it! This is about the highest development of the tonewheel technology, and the final model with tubes in it. (The following R-100 series still had tonewheels, but the amp was all-transistor, it had a built-in small Leslie, no vibrato, and had an autorhythm device.) I think of this organ as analogous to one of the last steam locomotives. The new digital keyboards will do a lot more and are far more portable, but you've got to admire what they did with the old technology.

Mine is an H-182, "Italian Provincial" in walnut. It's a gorgeous piece of furniture as well as sounding great. It was built in 1967. I don't think anybody's going to steal it, but if the house burned down around it I'd try to find another. :-)

Software version? It's a tonewheel Hammond. Nuff Said. (ok- mine's an H-111 made in 1966) :)
If you can play one already, you're already there. If you have only played synths before, it takes a bit of getting used to, but you will be rockin in no time...

Unlimited polyphony, 2 61-key manuals withtypical Hammond organ key action, except these beasts have 'standard synth-type' keys as opposed to the 'waterfall' keys on the B-3 and other early Hammonds. 25-note pedalboard. Expression Pedal.
It has built-in vibrato (4 settings), reverb (3 settings), traditional Hammond percussion and keyclick, and really CHEEZY synthesized 'brush' and 'cymbal' sounds that are triggered when any key is pressed.
The only real expansion you could do to this would be to plug it into a Leslie (has a 7-pin plug in the back to connect to a Leslie or Hammond external speaker cabinet.
MIDI? You gotta be kidding, though I am sure that you could get it retrofitted like other Hammonds.
No sequencer of course...

Well, it has awesome organ sounds! :) If I had a Leslie I am sure I could get it to sound exactly like a B-3
Works great with any genre that would feature a Hammond. Rock, Jazz, Gospel, Grandma's Lawrence Welk, you name it, this beast will do it.
The reverb on mine is almost nonexistant (It probably needs servicing) The vibratos are not too bad although it really needs to be hooked up to a Leslie.
It handles like any other tonewheel Hammond.
No velocity or aftertouch.

This thing is a freaking TANK. Its 450 lbs of solid wood and metal! A major bitch and a half to move.
It has a buttload of primo audio tubes in it (TWO 5AR4/GZ34's, one EF86, four 6BQ5/EL84s, four 7199's, several 12AX7's, and two 7591's) and would probably cost a fortune to retube with quality NOS tubes.
If I had a crew to move the thing I would surely gig with it!

Hammond-Suzuki doesnt support anything older than 1985.

Goff won't waste their time with anything that isn't a B-3, C-3 or M-3. They referred me to Organ Service Co. who got me some manuals in a hurry.

I also recommend www.vintageorgans.com for parts and support.

If someone wanted to bust their back getting it out of the house, they can have it, but I would definitely want to get my hands on another old tonewheel Hammond!

If I only had a Leslie, this beast would rock the house! It doesn't do too badly without it however.

Bottom line- If you can't afford a B-3, seek one of these out, it is the poor man's B-3!