The Hammond XK-5 Organ destined to become the gold standard in organs.

On classic Hammonds, pressing a key closes nine mechanical contacts: one for each drawbar. Your ears usually hear the multiple harmonics as one note. Depress a key slowly, however, and you can hear the harmonics come in at slightly different times. Normal playing created a subtle “slop” between otherwise crisp attacks, and the more drawbars you pull out, the more of an almost subliminal but chewy and soulful character it impacts to the sound. One perhaps feels this more than hears it, but seasoned players certainly notice its absence.

You can’t accomplish this with a single MIDI note-on, which is what most of today’s organ and synth key actions use. The XK-5 has three mechanical contacts at different points in the keys’ travel. Each of these in turn triggers three virtual contacts, giving you separate “note on” connections for every drawbar frequency in the same manner as the original nine-contact electro-mechanical Hammond® organs. The result is a fingers-to-music connection that perfectly duplicates sitting at a vintage B while saving on weight and cost. Plus, the time-spread between these “note ons” is programmable, as is the order in which you hear the harmonics speak. And since the contacts all receive and transmit MIDI note data, you can capture every harmonic nuance of your performance in your DAW program of choice—to which you can directly connect the XK-5 via USB.

The XK-5 was designed to duplicate the heft, bounce, and key dip of a “new old stock” and well-maintained B-3™: No springy synth keys allowed! 

The XK-5 employs new proprietary technology to recreate Hammond’s storied tone wheel generator with unprecedented accuracy and flexibility. Tone wheels were spinning discs on shafts, each with its own pickup pointing at the edge. The pattern of “teeth” cut into the edge of the wheel and its rotational speed determined the pitch. Modeling and sampling are combined in an exclusive process to capture the frequencies of all 91 tone wheels found in the original organs, not to mention other important sonic details such as key click, harmonic percussion, vibrato-chorus, and more.

In addition to letting you perfectly duplicate different conditions of Hammonds—from showroom-new to road-abused if that’s what you’re going for—there’s the ability to recreate individual organs right down to the model, year, and serial number! Presets will capture the exact tonal qualities of famous artists’ instruments, from jazz great Dr. Lonnie Smith to Chuck Leavell (The Rolling Stones) to Gregg Rolie (Santana, Journey) and more.An often overlooked subtlety of the Hammond sound was that the tone wheels generated tiny voltages that needed to be stepped up, and you could be “drawing on” some of the same wheels at the same time by playing similar notes with similar drawbar settings on both manuals. All signals from the upper, lower, and pedal manuals passed through a matching transformer that was intended to even things out before the signal moved on to the preamp and vibrato-chorus scanner. The transformer—a piece of iron with a coil wrapped around it—could “remember” some of its saturation based on how hard it had been working previously, thus affecting new notes played. Physicists call this hysteresis. Musically speaking, it affects how much “volume robbing” you hear and adds to what Hammond aficionados think of as the “breathing” quality of the organ. (The phenomenon is similar to why some recording engineers like transformer-equipped microphones and/or preamps for certain sounds.) In the XK-5, the matching transformer and its place in the signal chain is modeled precisely, and the saturation and hysteresis amounts are adjustable from barely-there to over-the-top. Like we said, we’re closing the final few millimeters of the realism gap.