Adjusting the Organ and Sustain Parameters

Let's take a look at some more of the model characteristics of the EVB3. So I'm going to open up the hood. And we've already taken a look at the Pitch and Condition columns, so now let's take a look at the Organ and Sustain columns. So the Organ parameters have to do with the tonal balance of the organ and a lot to do with the tone wheel emulation. So what I'm going to do is set up a drawbar registration so that we have a basic sound to work with. So I've got this one here. (music playing) And so the first parameter we have is the number of tone wheels that the EVB 3 is going to emulate.

So the parameter is called Max Wheels, and right now it's set to 91, so that's a number of tone wheels. (music playing) So I can bring this all the way down to 1, and so now it's just emulating 1 tone wheel. There's a lot less for harmonics. It's a much smaller sound. (music playing) So I can increase that number, and the maximum is 91. So the reason why you might want to decrease it is that it uses more CPU to emulate more tone wheels, but obviously you also lose out on sound quality. So the next control we have here is the Tonal Balance.

So what this adjusts is the mix between higher and lower tone wheels. So if I move this to the positive value, I have a brighter sound. If I move it to negative value, it's a bit darker. (music playing) The next parameter is Shape. The tone wheels in the EVB 3 generates sine wave forms, although they have a little bit of noise and artifacts, but generally speaking, it's very close to a sign wave form. So what Shape allows us to do is adjust the waveform the tone wheels are generating. Some of the other electromechanical organs of the time generated different wave shapes, so this helps us emulate those types of organs.

So I'm going to adjust a shape, so that's this parameter right here. (music playing) This waveform is definitely brighter and if I move it the other direction here, it's a little bit darker of a sound. So beneath that what we have is the Bass Filter, and this is going to apply to our foot pedals. So in order to hear this, what we're going to have to do is change our MIDI Controller to MIDI Channel 3, and that way we can hear the bass pedals, so I'm going to do that. So now I have it set to MIDI Channel 3, and what I'm going to do is go ahead and pull out these drawbars for the pedals.

So now if I play, you can hear we've got our bass pedals. I can adjust the filter here. So I can open it up and then we get more higher frequencies, or I can close it down and it's a more focused lower end. The reason why I have this Bass filter is sometimes when you have the pedals versus the upper drawbars and lower drawbars and the pedals can sound relatively bright and that's usually not what you want, because you want it to be holding down the lower end, so this allows you just to set that bass filter to have the bass be more focused.

So beneath that what we have is Ultra Bass, so this actually refers to the upper and lower manuals. What it will do is it will extend the range by an octave, so it will give us one more octave lower down. So I'm going to set our MIDI Controller back to Channel 1, because I want to use the Upper drawbars. And in order to hear this parameter, what I'm going to have to do is turn off our Preset keys, because remember, our preset keys are in the range of C0 up to B1. So because I've extended the range of our bass now, I don't want it to interfere with our preset keys.

So I'm going to turn off MIDI to Preset key, so down here. So I'll turn it off and so now when I play the keyboard, so I can play C1, which is typically the lowest note of the Upper manual, and I can continue to go lower, so I get that extra octave, which is nice. So I'll turn that off and turn back on the MIDI 2 Preset key. Next what we have is a couple of volume controls. So we have the Lower Volume and the Pedal Volume. With the Lower Volume, we can balance the lower manual with the upper manual, and with the Pedal Volume we can adjust the Pedal Volume.

Just down at the bottom we have this Percussion option. So this is going to affect our Percussion parameters that are up here. So right now it's set to Always, and what that means is that any drawbar registration that I have set, it will let me use the Percussion effect. Now the original B3 only allowed you to use the percussion sound if you had it set to the B preset registration, so this one here. So we can emulate that mode with Only B. And so now when I'm on this B present, I can turn on the Percussion mode and we can clearly hear it. But if I go to another preset registration, the percussion isn't active.

Typically, I like to leave this on Always, because it's nice to build these percussions with any of our drawbar registrations. So I'll turn off the Percussion. And next we have the Sustain parameters. So the Sustain parameters are technically release parameters, so that means that that's to do with once we let go over the note, how long they'll ring out. So I can have discrete control over the sustain for the Upper manual, Lower manual, and Pedals. So let's increase the Sustain/Release. Okay, so now if I play a note, you can hear it takes a long time for it to fade out.

(music playing) One interesting thing happens. If I play a couple of different notes-- (music playing) --when I play a new note it cuts off the sustain of the previous note, but then the last note that I play rings out for the full length. That's because we have it set to Smart mode. And if I change that, we can set it to Normal mode. And what that's going to do is when I play notes they will sustain over each other. (music playing) So sometimes that's useful and other times you wanted to be in Smart mode, and so I think the best reason to use Smart mode is for lower notes or especially the pedals, because you don't want lower frequencies overlapping.

You can really build up and get a lot of mud in the sound. As you can see, there's a lot we can do to customize our organ model with the Organ and Sustain parameters. In the next video let's explore how we can use the Effects section to add life and thicken the sound.