Picked up the sound of the organ somewhere in the background soundtrack to my 1970s childhood. But I first took up the guitar and learnt how music works that way. Played in bands; blues, rock, R&B, funk, jazz etc. Many years later, my appreciation of the Hammond sound was well advanced and I finally took the plunge to take on "the beast".
Hammonds are cool. That dirty tonewheel and tube-driven sound of the Hammond B3 and Leslie speaker combination has "soul" hard-wired into it; from haunting tones to bright-lights jazz, and from gut-bucket blues to a spine-tingling gospel roar. It's the closest thing this side of heaven, if you ask me.
There is a fine tradition of Hammond organ in jazz, blues, gospel and soul that I perhaps naïvely aspire to emulate, set forth by the likes of Wild Bill Davis, Jimmy Smith, Don Patterson, Trudy Pitts and Billy Preston, among so many others. It basically involves laying chords and soloing with your right hand, playing bass lines or chords with your left, stabbing bass pedals with one foot, pumping a volume pedal with the other, adjusting sets of 9 tonal drawbars, percussion and vibrato tabs and switching rotary speakers between fast and slow (or stop)… all at the same time. And yeah, make it swing.
Ok, I don't have a B3 (yet)… but my organ set-up has a pretty convincing sound (and with organ, tone is everything). I currently play a Hammond XK33 double manual organ with a Motion Sound Pro-145 rotary amp. Having tweaked the presets and various other settings, it sounds just the way a Hammond should. Most importantly, I can pull it apart and pack it into my car without assistance (although upstairs clubs are always a pain).
At the moment I'm playing with a 7-piece funk outfit called The Skylines, which includes a singer plus saxophone and trombone on top of the rhythm section. The medley is taken from a recent demo recording.
I also occasionally get back to my jazz/blues roots with my former bands Coolsville and Home Cookin', but that hasn't happened for a while. Someday I'll get some kind of trio/quartet off the ground. I've also been known to head down to a blues jam for fun.
I've been fooling around with GarageBand on my MacBook lately so I might post something here when I figure it all out. Then again, don't hold your breath.