Hammond Leslie: Spinning With The Pianimal
New Monsoon's keyboard player, Phil "The Pianimal" Ferlino is half piano player, half animal (judging by the sideburns and Hugh Jackman's role in the X-Men movies, I'd say some kind of wolverine). In this piece, Phil talks to us about his Hammond Leslie speaker setup which includes a dedicated speaker and some stereo mics to capture different perspectives on the rotating speaker madness.
PHIL FERLINO: It has a preamp that powers this thing. This thing gets all --
PATRICK OGLE: Oh, so the trick to that it's kind of --
PHIL FERLINO: Yeah. It's a preamp and what it does is it takes a signal in from the organ, just a 1/4" in, an then it sends out a Leslie out. Of any of it, there's four types of Leslies with different pin-out configurations, and this one is a 122, so you can have any one of those, and you can actually run multiple Leslies at a time. I'm just using the one, so it takes a 1/4" input and then it sends a Leslie out, and the cable to the Leslie sends three things: power, signal, and switching which gives you the slow/fast so that's very important, and also a volume pedal for the organ.
PATRICK OGLE: That's the volume pedal. That's the Leslie pedal.
PHIL FERLINO: Yeah, and then this is just this Mackie powered speaker which is a good monitor. It's pretty clean, clear.
PATRICK OGLE: And there's the Leslie which we can't figure well.
PHIL FERLINO: There's the Leslie. It's not lit up very well up here.
PATRICK OGLE: You put two mics because --
PHIL FERLINO: Yeah, because that will give you -- That will give you a good stereo image, so that when the Leslies are going left to right.
PATRICK OGLE: That's-- These are older pieces of gear.
PHIL FERLINO: This is -- Oh yeah. They've been around since the '60s but they still make them, and they make them much more gear roadworthy now. This one is an older one. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how old it is. I bought it used for $400 and that was a steal at the time.





Post new comment