Synthesizers · Instrument
Wheelhouse
A tonewheel organ with 91 tone wheels, nine drawbars for each of two manuals and two for the pedals, percussion, scanner vibrato and chorus, key click and overdrive.
Opinion
Not yet auditioned in a host. The defaults are the classic jazz registration, 888000000, on the upper manual with C3 chorus and a little drive, and a soft 008530000 on the lower. Switch Percussion on (third harmonic, fast) for the bright, short attack on a phrase, pull the 1’ drawbar and notice it goes quiet while percussion is on, as it should. Put a rotary speaker after it for the full sound: there is no Leslie in here.
Functionality
Ninety-one tone wheels turn all the time. A held key connects nine footages (16’, 5 1/3’, 8’, 4’, 2 2/3’, 2’, 1 3/5’, 1 1/3’, 1’) to the output through the drawbars, set 0 to 8 in 3 dB steps. The upper and lower manuals have nine drawbars each and the pedals two; each answers its own MIDI channel (1, 2 and 3 by default; 0 turns one off). Notes above the top wheel fold back by octaves, so the top of the keyboard stays in tune. Percussion (upper manual) adds a decaying second or third harmonic on the first key of a legato phrase. Vibrato/Chorus is a scanner: V1-V3 vibrato and C1-C3 chorus at 4-9 Hz on the upper and/or lower manual. Key Click, Drive, Tone, Width and Volume finish the sound, and CC 11 is the swell pedal.
Keys: upper and lower C2-C7, pedals C2-G4. Velocity is ignored, as on an organ.
Parameters
| Parameter | Range | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Upper drawbars | 0-8 x 9 | 888000000 |
| Lower drawbars | 0-8 x 9 | 008530000 |
| Pedal drawbars | 0-8 x 2 | 8 0 |
| Percussion | Off, On | Off |
| Perc Harmonic / Decay / Level | 2nd, 3rd / Fast, Slow / Soft, Normal | 3rd / Fast / Normal |
| Vibrato | Off, V1-V3, C1-C3 | C3 |
| Vibrato Upper / Lower | Off, On | On / Off |
| Scanner Rate | 4-9 Hz | 6.9 Hz |
| Key Click | 0-100 % | 30 % |
| Drive | 0-100 % | 15 % |
| Tone | 0-100 % | 100 % |
| Width | 0-100 % | 50 % |
| Volume | 0-100 % | 70 % |
| Upper / Lower / Pedal Channel | off, 1-16 | 1 / 2 / 3 |
The panel
Three banks of drawbars, pulled down to add a footage (click or drag a bar, or scroll over it), with the console’s brown, white and black caps. The Jazz, Full, Flute and Reed buttons set a manual’s drawbars in one click. Percussion, the scanner, the sound controls and the three MIDI channels sit underneath, and controls that do nothing in the current mode are dimmed.
Status
Core covered by tests (104 checks): the wheel mapping and foldback against a hand-written table, each footage’s pitch, every drawbar step, the divisions and channels, percussion, the scanner sidebands against the FM formula, key click, drive, tone, levels, block-size independence and bad input. The voicing (percussion times, scanner depths, click level) is by ear. Not yet listened to or validated in a host.