The Hideaway e-Grand

The 1938 Hammond Novachord, 1974 Farfisa Syntorchestra and 1976 Polymoog 203A are all examples of three early polysynths capable of producing piano-like timbres. The Novachord was without question the world’s first commercial all-electronic polyphonic instrument designed to emulate the piano amongst other timbres. 

To design something that electronically synthesized anything even remotely sounding like a piano in 1938 is nothing short of miraculous and a huge credit to the incredible ingenuity of Laurens Hammond and his fellow engineers!

If you think Loot Audio ever overstates this then look up his patents from the era – one of which is pretty much the definition of the basis of the modern analog synthesizer. All have one thing in common in that they rely on formant synthesis to produce these tones. As is often the case, such instruments tend to exhibit sweet spots over relatively narrow registers.

For a while now Loot Audio thought it might be interesting to try and carefully blend the best of these registers captured from the three instruments in an attempt to try and create something where an evocative, expressive and playable nature was more the end goal than realism.

As it turned out the grainy organic nature of Hideaway’s very own and rather infamously “vintage calibrated” Novachord #346 provided a special ingredient in the lower registers, the Polymoog added much of the mid-range warmth and the really quite beautiful highs were thanks to the Syntorchestra with the help of the Omega 8. After much play testing, the samples were carefully layered and tube equalised.

After bringing together such a rare combination of instruments, Loot Audio thought it might be quite fitting to introduce some equally unusual signal processing technology. They recently rescued a 1960’s Baldwin all-tube “Panoramic” stereo spring reverb. After building a high voltage power supply and modifying the spring to be centrally excited with a piezo ceramic transducer a pseudo stereo signal could be picked up from the two ends. What is particularly unusual about Baldwin’s patented design is that the signal is AM modulated at 20KHz and passed over the spring as an ultrasonic wave. The signal at the end of the spring is then received and demodulated back to audio.

The advantage of this technology is that the spring, rather bizarrely, is nothing like as sensitive to vibration as a normal spring reverb tank. It is also much less prone to the usual ricochet effects caused by high-energy transients. The frequency response is a little flatter too. Although Loot Audio found the reverb was a little noisy, it sounded surprisingly dense and complex so they created a series of impulse responses and were very excited to hear they worked remarkably well as a convolution reverb.

Almost by luck, it turned out that the reverb worked nicely not only on vocals but also with piano. In Kontakt, some careful velocity to filter and attack mapping was applied along with sustained damper emulation. All in all, an unusual combination of instruments resulted in a unique electronic piano with quite a lot of heart.

Features

• 1938 Hammond Novachord #346
• 1974 Farfisa Syntorchestra
• 1976 Moog Polymoog 203A #3211
• Studio Electronics Omega 8
• 1960’s Baldwin “Panoramic” stereo ultrasonic tube spring reverb
• Two Hideaway Studio TEQ-9B Rackmount Active 9 Band Tube EQs
• Sampled in 24-bits and presented in a simple but effective GUI along with 8 example patches which the user may edit and save

System Requirements

• Full Kontakt 4.2.4 or above

Important Note: Full version of NI Kontakt 4.2.4 and above is required. Will not function with the free NI Kontakt Player.