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Old 4th Nov 2021, 11:52 am   #1
Martin Bush
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Default Chord organs

Hi all

This may be stretching things a little, but the item in question is vintage, can be found in households and is electromechanical.

I'm interested in chord organs and wondered whether anyone knew why many have Bflat, F, C, A, D and G chords available, but no E.

Any idea why this might be? I know they are simple instruments and my music theory is almost non-existent. Is there a technical reason for instance?

Martin
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Old 4th Nov 2021, 1:53 pm   #2
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Default Re: Chord organs

My colleagues in the music shop have suggested that its because the chord organs were intended for church music, playing in C major.
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Old 4th Nov 2021, 2:27 pm   #3
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Default Re: Chord organs

I thought the answer might be along those lines, but I don't have the musical knowledge to work it out

They are interesting and quite clever devices.
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Old 4th Nov 2021, 5:56 pm   #4
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Default Re: Chord organs

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Originally Posted by mole42uk View Post
My colleagues in the music shop have suggested that its because the chord organs were intended for church music, playing in C major.
Or F, I seem to remember ours had a set of minor chords and 7ths too.

Steve.
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Old 4th Nov 2021, 6:03 pm   #5
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Default Re: Chord organs

Seems I made up the bit about 7ths! In my defence it was a very long time ago...

Ours was a 'Rosedale' from Wollie's like this pic - I spent hours and hours playing it

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Old 4th Nov 2021, 6:29 pm   #6
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Default Re: Chord organs

There seem to be different standards and some have minors. I hope to get one at some point and am just doing a bit of research.

Daniel Johnston had one, which is good enough for me.
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Old 4th Nov 2021, 8:37 pm   #7
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I recall hymn music had chord annotation below the staves to enable music from these organs to be played by the unskilled. Kept the singers a bit on track, it must have been a revelation to the congregation in remote places.

If you want a go on one the Chiltern Open Air Museum (coam.org.uk) will let you if asked nicely in their "Tin Tabernacle".
 
Old 4th Nov 2021, 10:08 pm   #8
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Default Re: Chord organs

Wow, this brings back the memories. Late 70's, I went into the music industry, repairing dozens of organs each week in the distributors workshop.

I never thought about the buttons on the chord organ, but yes, it was just B flat, F, C, G, D and A, along with the minors.

From a musical point of view, I think it is just simplicity. C has no sharps or flats, and so is felt the easiest key to play in. F has just one flat (B flat), whilst B flat has two flats (B flat and E flat).

G has one sharp, (F sharp). D has two sharps, (C sharp and F sharp), whilst A has three sharps, (C sharp, F sharp and G sharp).

Really, the more sharps or flats you have, the more difficult it becomes to play.
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Old 5th Nov 2021, 10:55 am   #9
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Default Re: Chord organs

Thanks Kevin. While I don't want to go off topic and take this into musical theory, that's really helpful.

As I understand it, chord organs are quite simple - a bit like a powered harmonium. I am on the lookout for one locally so that I can have a go at home.

Also, thanks to merlinmaxwell for the link to the museum. I heard something a few years ago on Radio Four about tin tabernacles and, while I am not religious, I'd really like to visit one.
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Old 6th Nov 2021, 6:17 pm   #10
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Default Re: Chord organs

Quote:
Originally Posted by Martin Bush View Post
Hi all
I'm interested in chord organs and wondered whether anyone knew why many have Bflat, F, C, A, D and G chords available, but no E.

Any idea why this might be? I know they are simple instruments and my music theory is almost non-existent. Is there a technical reason for instance?

Martin
I have never come across these. Some look like they have accordion-type buttons on the left.

As to the choices these give you the most likely chords in different keys, So for the key of C you would typically find F (IV chord) and G (V chord) and especially the last in a seventh form to resolve into the C.
This continues, so for the key of G (up a 5th), common chords whould be C and D(7). So a nice set to have to cover common keys would be: Bb F C G D A. Adding to each end works but you start to need a lot of them.
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Old 6th Nov 2021, 6:30 pm   #11
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Default Re: Chord organs

The tongue-in-cheek answer, from someone who knows something about the Methodist 'tin tabernacle' world in which some of these things may have been played, is that 'E' tends to be a 'guitar key' and no-one approved of hymns with guitars when these things were popular .

I'm not sure about the church connection, mind - even very small chapels had harmoniums (harmonia? - English blow, Americans suck ) from quite an early date. They don't (unlike accordions) have chord buttons - the versions of these things I used to pull out of skips when I was a kid seemed to be more like a cut-down piano accordion with a small fan blower so as to lose the bellows. The sound is similar, being a kind of small reed-organ, just like the simple mouth organ. I suppose at a time when pianos were large and expensive, electric pianos were expensive professional things (Rhodes) and organs tended to live in churches, if you were a normal person (or perhaps a normal person's kid) who wanted to find a cheap way in, these might have been a good option.
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Old 6th Nov 2021, 9:30 pm   #12
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while I am not religious, I'd really like to visit one.
. Nether am I, said tin church isn’t consecrated either.
 
Old 7th Nov 2021, 3:15 pm   #13
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Default Re: Chord organs

As above. These are not intended for rendering the full classical repertoire and when limting the choice of keys (in this case 6 of the possible 12) these are the useful ones for typical playing. You could go sharper (E, B, F#) and/or flatter (Eb, Ab, Db) but the law of diminishing returns starts to set in

These limitations are not unique to the cheap and simple instruments that are reed chord organs. For example, Wurlitzer's top-of-the-line electronic home organ of the late 1970s with a 5-figure price tag, offers amongst its many gadgets an automatic accompaniment generator. This provides bass, rhythm chords and drums in a choice of keys that you trigger with the lower manual. It offers major, minor and 7th chords in F, C. G, D and A. It also has minor and 7th in E, but no major as there is no B7 to support E major, and likewise major and minor in Bb but no 7th as there is no Eb to need it.

The CMOS IC that generates these chords also 'knows' about m7 chords but the select pin for this is N/C in these models. I wonder whether it 'knows' about the missing Bb or E7, even though there is no decode output from the keyscan matrix.
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Old 7th Nov 2021, 5:28 pm   #14
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The "Tin Church" at the open air museum has a recording of a reed organ playing, it sounds quite good, most of the notes are there and in the right order. I do like a belting church organ anthem (and did hand pump one organ for a whole piece, I was knackered afterwards) this was much more gentle, quite lovely.
 
Old 13th Nov 2021, 2:22 pm   #15
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Default Re: Chord organs

If anyone is interested in reed organs, then the bloke who wrote a (the?) technical bible of musical boxes, Arthur Ord-Hulme, also wrote a great guide to the harmonium. And if you live in the North, there's a harmonium museum in part of the Saltaire mill complex near Bradford.
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Old 24th Nov 2021, 4:49 pm   #16
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Default Re: Chord organs

If you can accommodate one, then I highly recommend a hundred plus year old harmonium like the one you can see behind my Ekco TV in my 'avatar' picture. I was given mine several decades ago by a former work colleague who had it in a garden summer house. This summer house was on a large turntable so that it could be revolved to face the sun. The structure hadn't been 'turned' for years and was in a very bad state and was going to be demolished - along with the organ. I ended up dismantling the summer house and transported it, along with the organ to my last house. The organ (harmonium) needed a bit of renovation to get it working, but they are actually quite easy to work on and not as heavy to move as you might think. Unfortunately, the old revolving summerhouse was just too far gone and rotten once taken apart to be put back together, so was scrapped. Those harmonium type organs make virtually nothing when they occasionally turn up in sales and often struggle to sell. The problem is their size and also the fact that folk think that they'll be heavy to lift and move like a standard piano, but they're not and they tend to have a large lifting handle on each side for moving on and off stages etc. There are some very elaborate examples with mirrors above and octave couplers etc. They have a 'big sound' with all the stops puled out, just like a proper small church organ and if space were no object, then I would seriously consider collecting them. I haven't played mine for a long time, due to having TVs and stuff piled in front of it - time for a tidy up, I think! At my other house I sometimes powered it from a vintage vacuum cleaner to save pumping it with the pedals - there's a handy orifice in the back, if I remember rightly, which is just the right size for the hose to be connected.
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Old 24th Nov 2021, 4:54 pm   #17
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Default Re: Chord organs

For any public demo of it, you need a nice period looking sign saying "Powered by Goblins"

David
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Old 24th Nov 2021, 5:00 pm   #18
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"Powered by Goblins"
I like it, David

You're not going to believe this, but the 'cleaner' that I used was actually an old cylinder Goblin, which unfortunately got lost somewhere along the way during the move. I now have another 30s cleaner that would likely do the job, although not a Goblin - the problem being that pulling the organ out from the wall in the restricted space is going to be difficult at the moment!
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Old 24th Nov 2021, 8:15 pm   #19
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Mine is powered by an Electrolux. It was a ZA65 that used to be the household cleaner 40 years ago. I cut the body down to remove the dustbag section, so that it would tuck into an alcove. IIRC 75V provides enough suction for normal playing.
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Old 25th Nov 2021, 8:08 am   #20
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That's nice. Mine (Boosey and Ching - must have been before Hawkes got involved) has a bit of string connected to the sprung air accumulator thingy which pulls a 'soft-loud' indicator on the front. Being English it blows - I guess that with the American ones which suck, then you can't get louder than 15psi will give you! Ord-Hulme is a bit sniffy about American organs with mirrors and ecclesiastical woodwork flourishes, but even on my fairly staid English device the keyboard is split in two, so there are at least twice as many stops as really do anything (and a couple of extras for some rather ineffective damper panels which are meant to quieten it a bit). With the emphasis on lots of user-features, it's all a bit Amstrad. But I like it for belting out old hymns, which mean something to me.
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