Homemade Leslie cabinet test: Whiter Shade of Pale (v1)
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- čas přidán 8. 09. 2024
- HAVE UPLOADED A NEWER VERSION WITH BETTER MICS: • Homemade Leslie cabine...
Built for less than NZ$200 from a pair of salvaged Leslie rotor assemblies. The cabinet's nearly full-size (55 x 51 cm, 81 cm high), with louvres cut to shape, trim fitted top and bottom, and the whole thing stained to (approximately) match my organ.
The horns are made from a pair of cheap plastic toy horns fixed into a couple of small funnels, screwed to a small round board, and fitted to the pulley of a rotor assembly (with the styrofoam baffle removed). The first assembly used a simple tweeter in the top, which was painfully inefficient (the horns were something like 4-6bB quieter than they should have been) and soon blew out. Replacing it with a compression driver sorted the problem out neatly.
The bottom rotor is a standard cheesewheel styrofoam baffle, fed by an upward-facing full-range Wharfedale. Putting the speaker on the bottom made it easier to have the two rotors turning in opposite directions, but meant that the louvres needed to be cut much higher than in a proper Leslie. It also means that any replacement speakers have to fit the unfortunately-narrow gap in there, which is the one design decision I now regret.
There's also some relay wiring to switch signals around for guitar, set up so that I can take my amp's preamp out signal to the relays, connect back to both that amp and to a slave amp, take the latter's speaker signal to the Leslie, and select between them with a footswitch. I've got a spare rotor left over, so I'll be building that into a Model 16-style cabinet with similar circuitry.
Recorded with a mix of dynamic mics: left top, right top, centre bottom. (they're too close, which is why there's motor noise in the right channel.)
The organ's a Hammond T-200 with pedals and drum machine removed, housed in a cabinet scavenged from an early 70s transistor Hammond (which was also the source for one of the Leslie rotors).
Played with 6876 000 on the bottom manual, 6868 00000 on top. 6886 00000 is often recommended, but backing off the 8' and pulling out the 4' helps to add some more bite back in to make up for the lack of B3-style percussion.
Apologies for the wobbly timing, keys aren't my main instrument. Might re-record it one day with better mic placement.
Fricken awesome. Old school(best) Leslie speaker sound. Great job on the improvisation of the horns. Fantastic job overall. Looks and sounds great.
I like it. However, the treble horn should have sound coming out of only one horn, not both. The second treble horn on a Leslie is only there for balance. Plug one side and it will reduce the frequency to a more Leslie like speed on tremolo.
Great sound and great look
Well that saved some money.
Now that is a great, absolutely great video. Very cool. Good choice of music too!
❤
Awesome! Thanks for sharing
Yeah man great leslie!
😊
The thing I caught is the very little time lapse it took for the tweeters to spin up to the fast mode. You must have a very strong motor or very light load compared to the original Leslie tweeters. Nicely done.
Aw, ta! It's exactly the same motor assembly as the bass rotor, so it's all down to weight. Not sure what original Leslie horn assemblies weigh, but I've just lifted the one I made out and it comes in at 200g/7oz. It's just a pulley from a styrofoam cheesewheel, a thin MDF cakeboard, two plastic funnels, and the two plastic horns all screwed and glued together, and a couple more screws added while balancing -- easy to do, very little weight burden overall.
Not gonna lie, my two biggest Hammond/Leslie loves are (a) glisses and (b) the sound of the bass rotor slowly catching up with the horns when switching fast/slow. Which might just be a factor in the song choice here -- the way Fisher put the two together gets me every time.
Oh, and: the second version has a camera pointing right at the horns, showing them off at 60fps. Stepping through frame-by-frame is a TRIP.
czcams.com/video/vhG2UQRYKUA/video.html
My man!
To mask the relay noise, try hitting a note simultaneously to changing motor speed. The key click hides the DC pop quite nicely. Better relays make less noise. The horn you built sounds excellent. Not sold on your choice of horn driver.
Have added a couple of capacitors across the relays as snubs -- they're not perfect but they definitely make things a whole bunch better. Probably a surer solution than asking a guitarist to properly co-ordinate both hands when playing keys!
The driver wound up blowing somehow which didn't endear it at all to me, the new one's rated higher but otherwise seems roughly the same. Hoping to re-record soon (have some MUCH better mics and mixer, and should hopefully bypass the problem of weird interference cutting in), will see what that comes out like.
@@butting23 I really like the Selenium D250-X driver. Have three of them in use, one in a bass guitar amp. Sounds nice in the Leslie.
I have a bag of 0.1uF caps that would fit. Thanks for the tip.
Brilliant! 👏🌹🇦🇺✌️
i think each of your horns is open to sound? In the original one is a dummy just for balance.
Aw, that's a keen eye for the details that matter!
I don't have a photo that properly shows the internals of the final assembly, but I'm hoping to redo this properly (with cleaner mics) and might see if I can get a useful angle if I lift the horns out again. The shot at 46s is a rough assembly only, and the yellow one was capped off before gluing everything together.
@@butting23 Thanks! I've had many of these contraptions and built several myself. If you have both horns open the rotor will sound twice as fast. The speed is crucial to my ear. The sound is right only over a small band. Good luck.
Not bad! If you get something (spray foam?) into the throat of one of the horns to block the sound, I bet it will sound much better. Also, the T200 can be modified to have "normal" percussion. How did you cut the louvres? Did you cut them on the inside, too?
Only one of the horns is live, and I'm hoping that any sound glitches will clean up with better micing. Which isn't to say that some foam wouldn't be a bad idea, but I'd want to make sure everything's fully balanced again afterwards. I still haven't finished all the mods and repairs I started on the Hammond way back when I put it together though (it's still only got two of percussion sounds working from the four I wired up, and there's no working reverb), so I'm not sure console-style percussion's on the cards yet.
Louvres are cut inside and out, just not finished as cleanly on the inside (see 1:15 and 1:20). Cut them with repeated passes of a router, which left a rough stepped shape, and then shaped the ends with a circular saw (with some very carefully placed guides), and then cleaned up with a half-round rasp file which'd been cut in half and had a handle welded to it, sticking out of the flat side at an angle. And finally: sanded and sanded and sanded and then sanded some more. A number of them broke and needed to be glued back and braced with metal straps (sort of visible at 1:10), but the wood used (recycled tongue-and-groove, with some weakening joints) contributed to that. Used a 6mm router bit (smaller would've meant more passes, which trades off against the later finishing work though), and took the first cut right through so the gap looking through is noticeably wider than in a factory Leslie (which is closer to 2mm).
CNC next time, for sure.
congratulations from brasil ! Is it cheaper than buying the ready-made box?
Aw, ta! Keeping in mind though that this is a passive one (with no on-board amp), I've never seen one for less than $600 here (and more usually twice that), and a new 3300 is $5000, so...
I've since been gifted (!!!) an M3, and will hopefully do the full song one day. But make sure you check out this more recent version, with better mics and cameras: czcams.com/video/vhG2UQRYKUA/video.html
The vent cut holes in the original Leslie are copy write. Watch Out!
Yeahhhhh there's nothing in here that wasn't in the 1950s models. The patents have well and truly expired by now.
Не идеально…
song name?
Its in the title, Whiter Shade Of Pale