[HAM] The beauty of Tonewheels - an alternate view

[Richard Horton]

While we are on this subject.....I ask this question on another list and got
no response, so I'll try again here: I was looking up at the tone wheels
spinning away in place on a running L-100 (with the generator that is rail
mounted with a removable heavy felt bottom so you can lay on the floor and
look up and watch the whole thing). The tone wheels themselves wander side
to side slightly on their shafts as they spin in front of the magnet point,
sometime regularly, sometimes randomly. This must introduce some random
variation in the tones or harmonics, no? Has this been discussed here
before?


----- Original Message -----
From: "pj geerlings" <pjgee at emptysquare.com>
To: "The Hammond Forum" <hammond at zeni.net>
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 10:44 PM
Subject: [HAM] The beauty of Tonewheels - an alternate view


> In the recent discussion about Tonewheels the focus seemed to be firmly on
> waveform. I won't dispute that the waveform is not pure sinous and it is
> probably not valuable here to weight the merits of individual differences
> between extant units - this has already been covered.
>
> What I haven't noticed in the discussion is a recognition of the one thing
> that is constant in the Hammond design. This is something I would call
> "harmonic reinforcement".
>
> Everytime you play a chord on a tonewheel organ the harmonics that make up
> each note are *always* in perfect alignment. This is because (for example)
> the same tonewheel that is used to sound at the 5 1/3' pitch for the root
of
> the chord is also used to produce the fudimental of the fifth of the
chord.
> The net result is that are simply no harmonic pitches that would tend to
> fight with each other.
>
> Yes, I know that the harmonic sequence is "off" and frankly, IMO, it is a
> very small price to pay for *that* sound.
>
> peace to all,
> pj geerlings
> nubi3.com