Hard Electronic Organs: Tonewheel to Wave Synthesis Quiz / Test | Music

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. The very first electric organ was the Telharmonium, a behemoth of an instrument installed in New York City in 1897. What did it do that no live performing instrument before it had done?

Answer: It transmitted to multiple locations

The first Telharmonium weighed seven tons and its later incarnations were much heavier still, but its sound was portable: The instrument generated its tones in electrical form and fed the resulting currents to telephone wires so that all a subscriber needed to do was to connect a simple loudspeaker to the line output and they would hear live performances, a full nine years before the first experimental radio broadcast.

2. The Telharmonium and the earliest Hammond organs used an electromechanical device called the tonewheel to generate the needed frequencies. What was used to pick up sounds from the early tonewheels?

Answer: Magnets and coils

A tonewheel was a simple and ingenious construction: A simple lightweight wheel had teeth fit to it at regular intervals similar to a gear. By spinning this wheel next to a pickup coil containing a permanent magnet, it induced an alternating current. Rotating wheels at different speeds and using different numbers of teeth per wheel allowed for various frequencies to be generated. Mixing these single frequencies created a surprisingly wide variance of sounds, many of them emulating natural instruments from the brass, woodwind and string family.

3. The next step from the tonewheel was to generate the frequencies through electronic oscillators. What key component was at the heart of the first oscillators used in electronic organs?

Answer: A vacuum tube

Using vacuum tubes for frequency generation and filtering eliminated most moving parts from the electronic organ and added new capabilities for manipulating the generated sounds. The key disadvantage of these early tubes was the large amount of heat they produced; also, instruments based on tubes needed very frequent maintenance and tuning to remain playable as, unlike tone wheel instruments deriving their relative frequencies from mechanical ratios, a small shift in frequency only affected some notes (those generated by one oscillator) instead of all of them and thus resulted in a very disharmonic, de-tuned sound.

4. Early oscillator organs could not compete with the tonewheel models due to their complexity and sheer number of oscillators and modifying circuits needed. This was to change even before the transistor era due to the development of a new component that used transformers - passive components not needing tubes - to derive most of the frequencies needed. What was the name of these components, still used in those modern organs that incorporate some analog voices?

Answer: Frequency dividers

The most basic form of frequency divider was just a chain of transformers that, connected in the right way, halved the output frequency at each stage. They made it possible to use just twelve oscillators with fixed frequencies to generate the chromatic notes and then derive all octaves from these twelve outputs. Later on, frequency dividers using different factors than 2 were invented and by using those, it became possible to accurately recreate all notes from a single oscillator, again eliminating tuning issues. From 1958 onwards, practically all electronic organs used frequency dividers.

5. Beginning in the 1950s, electronic organ manufacturers added playing aids to their products, allowing even a relative beginner to deliver a decent performance. Borrowing from the accordion, which feature was the first common playing aid?

Answer: A single-keypress chord panel

After the frequency divider architecture made it possible to sound many notes at a time, the next step was to use this capability to make playing chords easier: A rectangular button panel similar to the bass system of an accordion contained all important chords for each of the twelve base notes. Complex models had not only minor, major and seventh chords but also more complex ones such as chords with sixths, augmented and diminished chords. Chord organs were usually low-end to midrange home instruments designed for beginners.

The original design survived all the way into the 1980s in the form of a reduced panel allowing only between eight and twenty chords overall, usually those you would most often need in the keys of C major and a minor.

6. While never a leader in terms of sales volumes, the home organ company Gulbransen was nonetheless one of the most innovative. In 1957, its Model B was the first of a new generation of electronic organs due to which feature?

Answer: Transistorized sound generation

In the 1950s, transistors quickly took over the roles previously fulfilled by vacuum tubes in all areas of electronics. It was thus only a matter of time until the first manufacturer would transistorize the sound generation of their organs, eliminating many problems of the tube-based models.

The Model B still used tubes as power amplifiers, however; the first fully transistorized organ was Rodgers' Opus 1, an organ designed for use in churches.

7. Most bands today employ at least one keyboard player to benefit from the wide variety of sounds possible in electronic instruments. The first keyboard-style organs, using a single manual, no pedals and an easily portable case became popular in the 1960s under which name?

Answer: Combo organs

Affectionately known as "cheeseboxes" in parallel to the "squeezebox" term for accordions, combo organs took their name from the commonly used term "combo" for groups playing popular music in the early 1960s (the term "band" was at that time still mostly used for larger ensembles).

The two prominent manufacturers of this type of organ were Vox and Farfisa with the Vox Continental being the most famous model of the time - the famous organ solos on "Light my Fire" were played on a Vox Continental.

8. Beginning in the early 1970s, the first digital components appeared on the electronic organ market and by the early 1980s, most consumer-level organs incorporated at least some level of digital sound generation based on sampled natural sounds. What was the greatest technical limitation to these early systems that kept their sound quality relatively low for a substantial period of time?

Answer: Memory space

In the early 1980s, even a few kilobytes of memory represented a significant amount. Compared to the fact that you need over 160 kilobytes to just store a second of digital sound at CD quality, early digital organs could only sample a few milliseconds of each instrument and usually did not have a real sample for every tone, leading to the situation that only instruments with a rather constant sound over a note (like trumpets and flutes) were initially available in digital and even those only sounded natural over the one or two octaves best emulating their natural range.

Modern organs can contain several gigabytes of samples and thus can afford full-length samples of every note, even played at different volumes and speeds.

9. While internationally, electronic organ soloists often played on Yamaha or Roland instruments, during the mid-1980s boom of electronic home organs and organ entertainers in Central Europe, a German manufacturer named Wersi had a product lineup ranging all the way from children's instruments to state of the art stage instruments. During the early days of Wersi, their products had a unique feature making them very interesting for some hobbyists, namely what?

Answer: The organs were delivered as kits

Purchasing a Wersi organ in the 1970s and 1980s was a rather complex affair. You began with a base model and then added various kits and expansion cards to configure your instrument exactly the way you wanted it. Once you had all those decisions made, you could decide the state of assembly you wanted your organ delivered in: From all discrete pieces that required excellent soldering skills and extremely good manual dexterity in building the keyboards to fully assembled models, you could choose from at least five levels with the least assembled version retailing for less than half of the finished one.

10. After 115 years of history, the electronic organ as a standalone musical instrument is a dying species. Today, you are increasingly able to buy complete high quality assemblies of manuals, pedals, stops and all the needed command buttons but without any actual musical hardware. What other device do you need to use one of these "organ shells"?

Answer: A standard Windows PC or Mac

The best and most advanced electronic organs of the 2010s can be downloaded from the internet (with some of them even having free versions available) to run on any PC or Mac, allowing you to use the same keys and pedals with multiple sound generator cores. One of these organ emulators, called Hauptwerk, has complete samplings from actual pipe organs available and can thus emulate the greatest organs from around the world.

It does this task so well that, during a 2010 routine renovation of the actual Salisbury cathedral organ, a Hauptwerk-enabled PC was configured with samples of that very organ recorded one year earlier for distribution with the program, making this the first known case of an electronic organ seamlessly replacing a well-known pipe organ at its actual site.

Source: Author WesleyCrusher

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor ertrum before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

Electronic Organs: Tonewheel to Wave Synthesis Quiz

Ever since 1897, the idea of making the organ more portable and available for home use by replacing the pipes with electronic components has inspired engineers. Follow me across a century of fascinating instruments!

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