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Chapter 15 Vintage B3 395
Vintage B3 draw bar controls
Vintage B3 provides 20 draw bars, nine each for the upper and lower manuals, and two for the
pedalboard. The upper manual draw bars are on the left, the pedal draw bars are in the center,
and the lower manual draw bars are to the right.
The draw bars behave like reversed mixer faders—the farther down you drag the draw bars, the
louder the selected sine choirs will be. MIDI control of the draw bars is also reversed when using
a standard MIDI fader unit.
Each sine choir is a sine wave that is mixed in at a particular level, determined by the draw
bar position. You add sine choirs in this way to build up the overall organ sound for the upper
or lower manual. This is a basic form of additive synthesis; for more information, see Additive
synthesis with draw bars on page 427. You can intuitively pick up the fundamental principles of
additive synthesis by playing a little with the draw bars.
Two draw bars are available for the bass pedals. The waveform used for the bass pedal sound is
not a pure sine wave, like the waveforms used for the upper and lower manuals. The pedalboard
sound uses a mixed waveform, which accurately emulates the B3’s bass tones. The two registers
dier in pitch, with the left, 16-foot register containing more octave harmonics. The right, 8-foot
register has a more prominent fth portion (fth harmonics are enhanced). The term foot is
derived from pipe organ lengths.
You can simulate the behavior of the Model A, the rst Hammond organ ever made. This model
had no foldback for the 16' draw bar in the lowest octave, with the bottom 12 tone generator
outputs available on the rst draw bar of the manuals’ bottom octave. Without foldback, the
sound is more strident and similar to the pedal sound. Click the disclosure triangle at the lower
left, then choose “all the way down” from the Bass pop-up menu to simulate the Model A.