How can I make my guitar sound like an organ?

September 8, 2008 12:52 PM

How can I make my guitar sound like an electric organ?

I was listening to a Quintron organ solo, and thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if my bass sounded like an electric organ?"
Do you know of a way to do this? Maybe some kind of pedal? Dirty noisy sounds are okay, and cheap things (like under $100) are even better.

posted by abirae to media & arts (11 comments total)

There are a few good options:

* Midi pickup attached to a good organ simulator - I do this with guitar kind of a lot. I use a Roland midi pickup and an axon controller.

* There is a line 6 pedal that does some pretty cool stuff. My guitar teacher uses this on guitar quite a bit, don't know how well it works for bass. I believe he has this one

* There may be some other options. Something to think about here is, what makes an organ sound like an organ? Adding things like rotary speaker (or a similar effect), and tremolo will get you part of the way there. There might be some other effects you could add that would improve the sound.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:25 PM on September 8, 2008

Oh, and the organ sim I use is the B4 organ thing from Native Instruments. It's so much fun. The axon is quite sweet, also, in that it lets you divide up the strings between patches so I can say, the lowest 2 string use this patch, and the upper 4 use this patch. I can even divide by *picking zones* (pick near the bridge, use THIS patch, near the neck use THIS patch) or by fret (frets 1-5 use THIS patch, and 6-21 use THIS patch etc). This can give you a really wide range of tones. I also layer this over regular guitar which can be pretty interesting.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:26 PM on September 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Harmonix makes this neat analog synth pedal.
posted by damn dirty ape at 1:28 PM on September 8, 2008

A cheap phaser pedal might give you decent results depending on your setup.
posted by Uncle Jimmy at 1:37 PM on September 8, 2008

The Electro Harmonix POG pedal will do what you want, and the HOG pedal will do it to a certain extent. The POG allows you to do multiple octave shifts, but what gives it the organ sound is the ability to detune the octaves slightly. This simulates the fact that the B3 organ harmonic tones are ever so slightly off of true, which gives it that distinctive sound.

The POG is one of the only octave generators that will work with chords, so if you pair that up with a volume pedal you can get some very realistic organ swell sounds.

The micro POG will not give you the same sound, though, so skip that one.
posted by markblasco at 1:58 PM on September 8, 2008

The simplest answer is MIDI.

A MIDI pickup (Roland GK-3) will run you about $200. Plug that into any MIDI synth.

Organ snobs have strong opinions, but if you put the preset organ patch of any piece of crap through a rotating speaker effect, you'll be set.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:41 PM on September 8, 2008

A Rotovibe will give you that tremolo effect, though without the true vibrato a Leslie would have, but the sound is still fundamentally bass guitar. You could try out a Rotovibe and an overdrive for more of a lead-organ tone.

I've had some success with a slightly-modded Boss AW-2 autowah (intended for guitar, I'm abusing it with a bass), though I have no idea what the actual mod was (something involving undervoltage?). It cuts out a lot of my bass's lower tone, and the guitar-range harmonics that get through have a slight tremolo to them. Pair that with an overdrive pedal on a mild setting and it's a decent approximation of a fuzzed-out Hammond, though the Leslie effect isn't quite there. And with an octaver it has a really neat "cleaner" organ sound, though none of the truly reliable octavers are cheap enough to justify me purchasing one. If I had a few hundred to spare, the autowah and a POG or HOG would be weird faux-organ perfection.

This setup is *really* touchy though, the range of usable to unusable is less than a quarter-turn on pretty much any of the Autowah's knobs. And it does cut the bass a bit even when it's fully off. I'd like to try it out with some other brands, but the Boss pedal was basically free and I'm really more of a basic-tone guy.
posted by Benjy at 10:44 PM on September 8, 2008

And a lot of these answers seem aimed at "regular" electric guitar, not bass, so research anything that catches your eye before you hit eBay. I may have time to record the AW-2/distortion Frankenstein tomorrow, I'll post a sample here if I get around to it.
posted by Benjy at 10:47 PM on September 8, 2008

I used to get a good organy effect with my Boss pitch shifter/delay PS2. Looks like they range from $40 to $140 on ebay.
posted by brevator at 4:39 AM on September 9, 2008

Thanks for the suggestions! I'm going to have a good time playing around with pedals. I think I can find a phaser and possibly an autowah somewhere in my guitar playing friend's stash, and see what they sound like coupled to an octave pedal. I anticipate noisy glee.

The Harmonix equipment sounds dreamy. It's out of my price range right now, but I like having a holy grail to look for when browsing ebay and thrift stores.
posted by abirae at 7:46 AM on September 9, 2008

Okay, I just had a chance to listen to the HOG and POG. Dude, amazing! (and not likely to turn up for $40 at a garage sale, but you never know...)
posted by abirae at 7:59 AM on September 9, 2008