Clonewheel organ

"Clonewheel organ" is a jargon term used to refer to an electronic musical instrument that emulates (or "clones") the sound of the electromechanical tonewheel-based organs formerly manufactured by Hammond. The phrase "clonewheel" is a pun on the term used to describe how the original Hammond produces sound: through "tonewheels". The first generation of clonewheel organs used synthesizer voices, which were not able to accurately reproduce the Hammond sound. In the 1990s and 2000s, clonewheel organs began using sampling or digital signal processing techniques, which were much better able to capture the nuances of the vintage Hammond sound.

Clonewheel organs can be either keyboard-based instruments such as the Korg CX-3 or the Roland VK-7; or keyboardless emulation devices, which include MIDI modules, such as the E-MU B-3 module and software-based "virtual synths" (such as the B4 by Native Instruments [discontinued]). To use keyboardless emulation devices, they need to be connected to a MIDI-enabled keyboard.

The Hammond organ is an electromechanical organ that was designed and built by Laurens Hammond in 1934. While the Hammond organ was originally sold to churches as a lower-cost alternative to the pipe organ, it came to be used for jazz, blues, and then to a greater extent in rock music (in the 1960s and 1970s) and gospel music.

The original Hammond organ imitated the function of a pipe organ's ranks of pipes in multiple registers by using additive synthesis of waveforms from harmonic series to generate its sounds. The Hammond organ's individual waveforms were made by mechanical tonewheels which rotated beneath electromagnetic pickups. The component waveforms can be mixed in varying ratios by using drawbars mounted above the two keyboards. Hammond organs also have a harmonic percussion effect, in which the 2nd and 3rd harmonic tones can be added to the attack envelope of a note.

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