Electric organ
Cahill's techniques were later used by Laurens Hammond in his organ design, and the 200-ton Telharmonium served as the world's first demonstration of electrically produced music on a grand scale.
Built in Belleville, Ontario, the Robb Wave Organ predates its much more successful competitor Hammond by patent and manufacture, but shut down its operations in 1938 due to lack of funding.
In place of reeds and pipes, Robb and Hammond introduced a set of rapidly spinning magnetic wheels, called tonewheels, which excite transducers that generate electrical signals of various frequencies that are mixed and fed through an amplifier to a loudspeaker.
Instead of having to pump at a constant rate, as had been the case with the reed organ, the organist simply varies the position of this pedal to change the volume as desired.
The most revolutionary difference in the Hammond, however, is its huge number of tonewheel settings, achieved by manipulating a system of drawbars located near the manuals.
By using the drawbars, the organist can combine a variety of electrical tones and harmonics in varying proportions, thus giving the Hammond vast registration.
Although portable "clonewheel organs" started to synthesize and displace the original Hammond tonewheel design in the 1970s, it is still very much in demand by professional organists.
The industry continues to see a lively trade in refurbished Hammond instruments, even as technological advances allow new organs to perform at levels unimaginable only two or three decades ago.
Benjamin Miessner realized that a hybrid approach, using acoustic tone generators along with electronic circuits, could be a reasonable design for commercial products.
These vibrations are detected by a number of capacitive pickups, then the resulting electric signals are processed and amplified to create musical tones.
Following World War II and a business transfer, production resumed in 1945 by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company and continued into the early 1960s, including some models retaining the Everett name from 1945 to 1947.
[16] In the same decades, similar electro-acoustic instruments — i.e. electric-fan driven free reed organs with additional electronic circuits — were developed also in Japan.
[21] According to the additional patents[22][23] and the reviews at that time, its later implemented design, seems to had shifted to a sound-colorization system using the (various) combinations of reed sets, microphones and loudspeakers.
Today's solid-state instruments do not suffer from the problem, nor do they require the several minutes that vacuum tube organs need to bring the filament heaters up to temperature.
Early electronic organ products released in the 1930s and 1940s were already implemented on frequency divider technology using vacuum tubes or transformer-dividers.
The design of the Lowrey's electronics made it easy to include a pitch-bend feature that is unavailable for the Hammond, and Hudson built a musical style around its use.
These instruments have a more traditional configuration, including full-range manuals, a wider variety of stops, and a two-octave (or occasionally even a full 32-note) pedalboard easily playable by both feet in standard toe-and-heel fashion.
The home musician or student who first learned to play on a console model often found that he or she could later make the transition to a pipe organ in a church setting with relative ease.
College music departments made console organs available as practice instruments for students, and church musicians would not uncommonly have them at home.
[26] These instruments were much influenced by theatre organs' sounds and playing style, and often the stops contained imitative voicings such as "trumpet" and "marimba".
The instrument's design reflected this concept: the spinet organ physically resembled a piano, and it presented simplified controls and functions that were both less expensive to produce and less intimidating to learn.
Expressive pumping added a strong dynamic element to home organ music that much classical literature and hymnody lacked, and would help influence a new generation of popular keyboard artists.
In some cases, Hammonds were used, while others featured very small all-electronic instruments, only slightly larger than a modern digital keyboard, called combo organs.
The Solina String Ensemble was used extensively by pop, rock, jazz, and disco artists, including Herbie Hancock, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Stevie Wonder, The Carpenters, George Clinton, Eumir Deodato, The Rolling Stones, The Buggles, Rick James, George Harrison, and The Bee Gees.
Digital organs incorporate real-time tone generation based on sampling or synthesis technologies, and may include MIDI, and Internet connectivity for downloading music data and instructional materials to USB flash drive or media card storage.
Marketed by Eminent, Wyvern, Copeman Hart, Cantor, and Van der Pole in Europe, synthesis organs may use circuitry purchased from Musicom, an English supply company.
Software applications can store digital pipe sound samples and combine them in real time in response to input from one or more MIDI controllers.
In contrast to frequency divider circuitry with only a few independent pitch sources, quality electronic church organs have at least one oscillator per note and often additional sets to create a superior ensemble effect.
However the high initial cost, and longer lead time to design, build, and "voice" pipe organs has limited their production.
The builders of both custom and factory digital church organs include the firms of Ahlborn-Galanti, Allen, Eminent, Johannus, Makin, Rodgers, Viscount, and Wyvern.
