Drawbars Forget Numbers - Think Shapes!The Hammond drawbar system, which we have on our Yamaha AR organs, is called the
FLUTE/TIBEA (THEATRE) and is accessed for each of your Key/PedalBoards, via the
UPPER ORGAN, LOWER ORGAN & PEDAL ORGAN tabs in the
ENSEMBLE section. I will continue to refer to them as
DRAWBARS.
We could receive instruction for several months about the intricacies of different famous players’ settings, but finish up feeling that we know less about the subject than when we started.
So in this Pearl I want to share how
simple it can be to
translate the sound that’s in your head into a drawbar setting.
Here I am not taking the conventional approach, that you will find elsewhere on the AR Group website, referring to the science behind their use, and talk about church organ pipes and their lengths, etc., because I don't need to. Here is a much more intuitive and simple way to get to grips with creating your desired drawbar sounds.
In essence, the drawbars can be thought of as an
upside-down graphic equaliser, and that's exactly how imaginative players use them to create their individual tones. You still have the bass on the left and the treble on the right, but because the bars are rolled out toward you, to increase their effect, or volume, the ‘EQ curves’ appear vertically flipped. Provided you’ve used a graphic equaliser, and I imagine most of you have, you should be able to relate to the drawbars straight away.
We can get involved in all sorts of discussion about pipe lengths, fundamentals, octaves, etc., but broadly, the drawbars can be considered a set of 9 tone controls on the AR100, or 8 tone controls on the AR80, ranging from deep bass on the left to sparkling treble on the right.
Let’s assume that you have never used a graphic equaliser, and, therefore start with a much simpler view of the drawbar system.
Let’s pretend the AR has just 3 drawbars:
a
bass,
a
middle, and
a
treble control.
This is just like a basic hi-fi graphic equaliser, but in the form of pull-out bars rather than rotary knobs.
In the diagrams below I’ve shown a very simple 3 Drawbar arrangement with a
Bass / Middle / Treble setup.
Here is a
bassy sound, which is created by rolling out the Bass bar to the maximum amount, and setting the middle and treble bars at much lower levels.
While here the level of the Bass bar is much reduced, and the Treble bar is set to maximum to generate a
trebly sound.
And, of course, this setup generates what we can call a
middling sound.
If that makes sense, you now understand exactly how the original Hammond drawbars work and how to use your Yamaha AR Flute/Tibia lightbars.
So in the next Reply, we see how we can easily add to this, to generate our own sounds.
Peter