Teeny weeny Leslies

[Mark Hammer]

Not really a weeny, but I posted some pics of my 8" Leslie at my site (http://hammer.ampage.org) with a brief writeup on how it functions.  These work a little differently from the standard big-cab multiple rotor Leslies, but the sound is still richer than what you get from a chorus or flanger.

[gez]

Sweet Mark!  This is still on my list of things to do (at some point during my lifetime).  

[bwanasonic]

"As you can imagine, with so many things in the way, upper treble is not this things finest attribute, but it sounds great."

That's not a bug, it's a feature!    Among the organ players and lelsie fanatics I know, what drives them nuts about pseudo leslie FX is an *inauthentic* excess of treble response.

Kerry M

[Ben N]

Mark, Mark, 8" isn't small... And you call it "Leslie"--interesting!  :lol:

But seriously, I've got a similar item, a Traynor Rotomatic (at least I think that's what it's called--I'm at work now).  It has only the rotating horn, but no speaker and no drum.  It is actually kind of a weak sound, and the motor is noisy as heck, so it doesn't get much use.  One of these days I'll probably return to the ebay from whence it came  

[Joe Hart]

I just got a Leslie 147 (I think). It's the big one that looks like a dresser or chest or some other piece of furniture. I haven't tried it out yet. It came with a Yamaha E2 organ. Pretty neat. And the price was definitely right! Does anyone know how I could hook a guitar into this thing? I believe that Jimmy Page recorded the solo for Black Dog with a Leslie, and I'm dying to try it out.  Any help would be great!! Thanks.
-Joe Hart

[Doug_H]

Yl;kjj

[R.G.]

I ran into a *real* weenie leslie a ways back. It was a 9" high wooden replica of the furniture-finish leslie cabinet with the vents around the top for the sound to get out.

Inside it was a 10 stage phaser based on a transistor ladder filter, and driven with an exponential LFO. IT even had foot-kickable fast and slow "rotation" speeds.

Multivox "Little David" LD-1.

Didn't sound much like a real leslie, though.

[Mark Hammer]

You have certainly been busy lately, Mark.

Did you build this from scratch or is it something in existence that you are adapting to your guitar? If it is from scratch, how did you do the cheese block?

Doug

Not as busy as I'd like to be.

Nothing you see in the pictures was made by myself.  Everything you see was once sitting inside an organ console.  It was generously provided to me by Phil Bova of Bova Sound (http://www.sageelectronics.com/bovasound/gear.html) in exchange for a couple of pedals I made for him (apparently some folks came in the other day and plugged their Wurlitzer piano into the Ross Phaser - with phasefilter and vibrato option - and it made them "Very happy").  My contribution is simply the case that now goes over it.  I posted the pix because I think there are some fairly limited notions of the ways in which a rotating sound is achieved, or the weight/bulk involved with producing it.

[jsleep]

Thanks Mark,

I'd love to see a picture of the unit as a whole.  Funny how it is that most of us DIY-types seem to always want just a little more that is currently available ;-)

The baffle looks like a smaller version of the one inside my Lesle Model 16.  If we could figure out a way to mold the closed-cell styrofoam (or other light material) baffles, we would be well on the way to DIY leslie clones galore!  I've thought about this long and hard, with no good results yet, sort of like how I've thought about DIY wah-wah casings  hehehe.  

There was a DIY leslie-from-scratch article floating around somewhere on the net, but the mechanics of building it looked extremely difficult for most of us.

Thanks!
JD Sleep

[Mark Hammer]

There was a DIY leslie-from-scratch article floating around somewhere on the net, but the mechanics of building it looked extremely difficult for most of us.

You're welcome.

I do believe that was the old Australian article posted on the "hairbear" site, which I can't seem to find now.

[jsleep]

http://topnet.com.au/~hairbear/greg.htm

http://topnet.com.au/~hairbear/page.2e.htm

You're right Mark.  I love this article, even though I believe it would be stretching my mechanical abilies and level of  application of precision.  

The other article that I always loved is the article for building bass pedals from scratch.  I have a heart for hard-core DIY  :lol:

JD Sleep

[Dan N]

I have a similar unit and I must say it sounds great. They have an urgancy that I have never heard from a pedal.

When I go thrift store shopping I always poke my head into the back of the old organs. The 10 inch version of that unit used a Jensen C10N that can usually be sold for more than the price of the organ.

I've seen a couple other styles of organ leslies. One has a cylinder with an oval speaker (in an easy to remove almost stand alone unit), another has a very small speaker on a revolving hammerhead, and another has a speaker firing up into a kind of cone shaped plastic thing (like in a clothes washer).

[Dean Hazelwanter]

A few days ago at work, a co-worker informed me that 'it looks like someone threw a guitar amp in our dumpster'. I fished it out - a Leslie 900 - not exactly teeny-weenie. Unfortunately the speaker was gone, but the whole mechanical assembly (for the 15" speaker) is intact and works. Since the box is so big with a lot of wasted space, I yanked out the mechanism. I'll try to get it into a (much smaller) new enclosure before fall.

Mark, if you're interested in hosting pictures of this one (before and after the guts were harvested) let me know.

[Regan]

Looking at pics of motion sounds setup, I think the rotating baffle is made out of maybe cardboard? What about bending and gluing cardboard into shape and then coating it with epoxy-maybe spray expanding foam behind the baffle to cut sound better etc.
Or maybe get the local surfboard guru to mold you one
Regan

[petemoore]

Plug the guitar in right where the organ went....boost may be necessary..N/P.
 For the baffle, I suggest Great Stuff...the expanding styrofoam in a can.
 Take an old SS mixing bowl, and use something fairly hard to bring a profile of the side out past where the baffle stock ends...then, using couter top or other...wrap a circle, put the mixing bowl/scoop arrangement in there, add in the Great Stuff, let it harden, use a cerrated knife to trim the excess, and bondo to finish and sculpt the inside [also to provice a harder, more reflective scoop inside surface.
 If you get everything centered, you should be able to make quick scoop baffles.
 Addendum: put a board in the bottom with nails sticking up for the Great Stuff to grab onto, then you'll have something you can screw into when mounting it to the turntable. [Put the turntable right in the bottom with screws or something sticking out of the top of it?].
 Great Stuff and a mold...can easily make most shaped items of this sort.
 For a guitar case, find or make a box your guitar fits in, shim the box  so the guitar head isn't touching. Wrap the guitar sealed in plastic [add a few layers of material between the guitar and the plastic wrap for 'elbow room'..divide the top and bottom of the box with a substrate shaped like the outline of the guitar...spray in the great stuff, and have a perfectly molded inside to your guitar box.

[Mark Hammer]

Dean,

Congrats!  Sure, be happy to post pics, although I still don't know how much space Steve Morrison has given me.  You can pay me back by telling me where they film "Corner Gas".  We'd like to make a pilgrimage when we pass through Saskatchewan in a couple of weeks (regrettably, not as far north as Saskatoon).


Pete, Regan,

I don't know that there is any "ideal" material for making a baffle.  The styrofoam "cheese wheel" was presumably ideal for the manufacturers from their vantage point.  One of the considerations for selecting moving baffle materials is the implications for acceleration/deceleration times.  Heavier materials will lengthen speed-up times, though you don't necessarily want instantaneous fast/slow changes either.  The weight and consistency of the materials will also have implications for balancing the baffle/rotor (like balancing wheels or ceiling fans so they spin evenly).  Obviously, highly lightweight, rigid materials will pose less of a problem with respect imbalance (whihc may be the rationale behind the styrofoam cheese wheel.

I can't prove it, but I reiterate my hunch that rotor diameter is key to a pleasing rotating sound, both in terms of creating suitable "throb" and the sorts of cancellation it produces.  Bear in mind that the same number of RPM, with a greater diameter and distance from the centre at the exit point of the horn/formed-baffle, means that the sound is moving around at a greater velocity.  There are obviously practical limits to how big you can make such a device and still be able to move it around, but my sense is that as big as you can within reason might just be better.

If anyone is familiar with any more mechanical/acoustic engineering approaches/literature to producing optimal doppler effects with a miving sound field, I'd be interested in that.

[Dean Hazelwanter]

I don't have the pictures here today - I'll try to send them out tomorrow. I might take some lower-res ones - seems to me these are ~500k each.

Corner Gas is filmed in Rouleau, a little South East of Regina. I've never been there, but I've heard the gas station is quite visible - not like in Wollerton (ptui!).   :wink:

[Mark Hammer]

Woolerton! (ptui).  I spat when I read it. :lol:

Thanks for the info.  During the height of popularity of the show "Twin Peaks", I made a pilgrimage to Snoqualmie Falls, WA while driving through Washington.  This pilgrimage will be even better.   Looking forward to seeing the world's biggest dirty cracked hoe. :wink: