Электронды кіборд аспаптары

Electronic keyboard instrument

An electric organ, also known as electronic organ, is an electronic keyboard instrument which was derived from the harmonium, pipe organ and theatre organ. Originally designed to imitate their sound, or orchestral sounds, it has since developed into several types of instruments:
Hammond style organs used in pop, rock and jazz;
digital church organs, which imitate pipe organs and are used primarily in churches;
other types including combo organs, home organs, and software organs.

The use of electricity in organs emerged in the first decades of the 20th century, but it was slow to have a major impact. Electrically powered reed organs appeared during the first decades of electricity, but their tonal qualities remained much the same as the older, foot pumped models. Thaddeus Cahill's gargantuan and controversial instrument, the Telharmonium, which began piping music to New York City establishments over the telephone system in 1897, predated the advent of electronics, yet was the first instrument to demonstrate the use of the combination of many different pure electrical waveforms to synthesize real world instrument sounds. Cahill's techniques were later used by Laurens Hammond in his organ design, and the 200 ton Telharmonium served as the world's first demonstration of electrically produced music on a grand scale. Meanwhile, some further experimentation with producing sound by electric impulses was taking place, especially in France.

In the wake of Hammond's 1934 invention of the tonewheel organ, competitors explored other possibilities of electric/electronic organ design. Other than the variations of tonewheel organ design, for example, a purely electronic interpretation of the pipe organ (based on "additive synthesis" design) seemed a promising approach. However, it requires a huge number of oscillators, and these circuit scales and complexities were considered a technical bottleneck, as vacuum tube circuits of those days are bulky and unstable. Benjamin Miessner realized that a hybrid approach, using acoustic tone generators along with electronic circuits, could be a reasonable design for commercial products. The Orgatron was developed in 1934 by Frederick Albert Hoschke, after a Miessner patent. A fan blows air over a set of free reeds, causing them to vibrate. These vibrations are detected by a number of capacitive pickups, then the resulting electric signals are processed and amplified to create musical tones. Orgatron was manufactured by Everett Piano Company from 1935 to 1941. Following World War II and a business transfer, production resumed in 1945 by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company and continued into the early 1960s, including some models retaining the Everett name from 1945 to 1947. In 1955, the German company Hohner also released two electrostatic reed organs: the Hohnerola and the Minetta, invented by Ernst Zacharias. In the same decades, similar electro acoustic instruments — i. e. electric fan driven free reed organs with additional electronic circuits — were developed also in Japan. Magna Organ invented in 1934 by a Yamaha engineer, Sei ichi Yamashita, was a multi timbral keyboard instrument similar to the Hoschke's instrument developed in the same year, although it utilized the microphones in the soundproof box instead of the electrostatic pickups. Initially the Magna Organ was designed as a kind of the additive synthesizer that summing up the partials generated by the frequency multipliers. However, it seems difficult to achieve polyphony without intermodulation distortions with the technology of the 1930s. and the reviews at that time, its later implemented design, seems to had shifted to a sound colorization system using the (various) combinations of reed sets, microphones and loudspeakers. This type of instrument was later re commercialized: In 1959, Japanese organ builder, Ichirō Kuroda, built his first Croda Organ with each pair of constantly oscillating free reed and a microphone in the soundproof box, and installed at Nishi Chiba Church in Chiba Prefecture.

Early electronic organ products released in the 1930s and 1940s were already implemented on frequency divider technology using vacuum tubes or transformer dividers. With the development of the transistor, electronic organs that use no mechanical parts to generate the waveforms became practical. The first of these was the frequency divider organ, the first of which uses twelve oscillators to produce one octave of chromatic scale, and frequency dividers to produce other notes. These were even cheaper and more portable than the Hammond. Later developments made it possible to run an organ from a single radio frequency oscillator. Frequency divider organs were built by many companies, and were offered in kit form to be built by hobbyists. A few of these have seen notable use, such as the Lowrey played by Garth Hudson. The design of the Lowrey's electronics made it easy to include a pitch bend feature that is unavailable for the Hammond, and Hudson built a musical style around its use.

Console organs, large and expensive electronic organ models, resemble pipe organ consoles. These instruments have a more traditional configuration, including full range manuals, a wider variety of stops, and a two octave (or occasionally even a full 32 note) pedalboard easily playable by both feet in standard toe and heel fashion. (Console organs having 32 note pedalboards are sometimes known as "concert organs".) Console models, like spinet and chord organs, have internal speakers mounted above the pedals. With their more traditional configuration, greater capabilities, and better performance compared to spinets, console organs are especially suitable for use in small churches, public performance, and even organ instruction. The home musician or student who first learned to play on a console model often found that he or she could later make the transition to a pipe organ in a church setting with relative ease. College music departments made console organs available as practice instruments for students, and church musicians would not uncommonly have them at home.

Electronic organs before the mid 1950s had used vacuum tubes which tended to be bulky and unstable. This restricted attempts to extend features and spread their use into homes. Transistors, invented at Bell Labs in 1947, went into practical production in the 1950s, and their small size and stability led to major changes in the production of electronics equipment, in what has been termed the "transistor revolution". In 1957, a home organ manufacturer, Gulbransen, introduced the world's first transistor organ, Model B (Model 1100). Although it uses transistors for tone generation, vacuum tubes are still used for amplification. Other manufacturers followed.

By the 1960s, electronic organs were ubiquitous in all genres of popular music, from Lawrence Welk to acid rock (e. g. the Doors, Iron Butterfly) to the Bob Dylan album Blonde on Blonde. In some cases, Hammonds were used, while others featured very small all electronic instruments, only slightly larger than a modern digital keyboard, called combo organs. (Various portable organs made by Farfisa and Vox were especially popular, and remain so among retro minded rock combos.) The 1970s, 1980s and 1990s saw increasing specialization: both the gospel and jazz scenes continued to make heavy use of Hammonds, while various styles of rock began to take advantage of increasingly complex electronic keyboard instruments, as large scale integration and then digital technology began to enter the mainstream.

Allen introduced the world's first digital organ (and first digital musical instrument commercial product) in 1971: the Allen Digital Computer Organ. This new technology was developed for use in home organs by North American Rockwell (project leader Ralph Deutsch) and licensed to Allen, which began using it for church organs. Allen later sued Rockwell and Deutsch, and gained sole rights to the digital computer organ technology.

Early combinations of pipe organs and electronic technology (including the electronic tone generators, at later) were developed in the 1930s. Custom electronic organ consoles occasionally replace aging pipe consoles, updating the electrical control system for the pipes as well as adding electronic voices to the organ. Even large pipe organs are often supplemented with electronic voices for the deepest bass tones that would otherwise require 16 to 32 foot pipes. For hybrid organs that combine pipes and electronic sounds, pipes change their pitch with environmental changes, but electronic voices do not follow by default. The frequency of sound produced by an organ pipe depends on its geometry and the speed of sound in the air within it. These change slightly with temperature and humidity, so the pitch of an organ pipe will change slightly as the environment changes. The pitch of the electronic portion of a hybrid instrument must be re tuned as needed. The simplest method is a manual control that the organist can adjust, but some recent digital models can make such adjustments automatically.

The first full electronic church organ was built in 1939 by Jerome Markowitz, founder of the Allen Organ Company, who had worked for years to perfect the replication of pipe organ sound through the use of oscillator circuitry based on radio tubes. In 1958, Rodgers Organ Company built the first solid state, transistorized church organ, its three manual Opus 1. In contrast to frequency divider circuitry with only a few independent pitch sources, quality electronic church organs have at least one oscillator per note and often additional sets to create a superior ensemble effect. For instance, Rodgers Opus 1 featured eight sets of transistorized pitch generators. Even today, digital organs use software based digital oscillators to create large numbers of independent pitch and tone sources to better simulate the effect of a large pipe organ.

Digital church organs are designed as pipe organ replacements or as digital consoles to play existing pipes. The differences in sound timbre between piped and digital instruments are debated, but modern digital organs are less expensive and more space efficient. Digital organs are a viable alternative for churches that may have a pipe organ and can no longer afford to maintain it. Some pipe organs, on the other hand, might be playable without major rebuilding for many decades. However the high initial cost, and longer lead time to design, build, and "voice" pipe organs has limited their production. Most new digital church organs synthesize sounds from recorded pipe samples, although some model the pipe sound by additive synthesis. Modelling the sound is done by a professional organ "voicer", who finishes the organ in its location, much like the process of regulating and voicing a pipe organ. These organs also use high quality custom designed audio systems. The builders of both custom and factory digital church organs include the firms of Ahlborn Galanti, Allen, Eminent, Johannus, Makin, Rodgers, Viscount, and Wyvern.