Before I say anything, listen to this! AWESOME! What you have just heard is the spookiest instrument ever, the Hammond Novachord. These rare beauties were manufactured by Hammond from 1939 to 1942 and only 1069 were made. It’s a real polyphonic synthesizer! Designed by John Hanert, Laurens Hammond, and C.N. Williams. (Way before Moog, but we still heart him.)
Look at this techno gumbo from Wikipedia: “Comprising of 163 vacuum tubes and over 1000 custom capacitors it weighed nearly 500 pounds and was roughly the size of two spinet pianos. The unique divide down oscillator architecture permitted all 72 notes to be played in unison. This was achieved through the use of vacuum tube monostable circuits permitting several octaves of like notes to be master tuned from one of 12 top octave oscillators.”
I had no idea these existed until a friend showed me Phil Cirocco’s amazing website. He takes you step by step through his Herculean effort to restore one to full working order. You can hear tons of gorgeous, rumbling audio clips and dork-out to photos of endless electronicy-thingys.
