Dr. Böhm organ
The Dr. Böhm organ is a series of electronic organs that the physicist Rainer Böhm initially developed for a textbook in the 1960s and which he continued through his company Dr. Böhm produced in Minden .
Today the Böhm brand is managed by Keyswerk Musikelektronik in Bückeburg . Electronic organs are still being produced there for the market of studio and stage musicians, house musicians and solo entertainers.
history
The instruments were sold - similar to the sale of motor vehicles - through a dedicated network of company branches, primarily in the Federal Republic of Germany, but also abroad.
The instruments were offered for self-construction. According to a construction manual, the customer first had to assemble all circuit boards by soldering the individual components and insert the keyboards and operating elements into the empty organ case.
The same sales concept - building it yourself in combination with its own factory branches - was later adapted by the German organ building company Wersi .
The "classic" Dr.-Böhm-organ ( "nT" series of n iederohmige T ransistortechnik ) has an analog tone: The respective highest of the 12 half-tones generated by the so-called "master oscillator", the lower octaves caused by frequency division in the ratio 2: 1, on an analogous route via synchronized blocking oscillator - oscillators .
The assignment of the individual footprints to the keys takes place in these models by means of a so-called "hardening" : Under each key there are eight or more synchronized contacts made of silver-plated spring wire, via which the LF signals are forwarded to the corresponding register when the key is pressed .
The arrangement of the organ registers is closely based on the model of the church organ . The Dr. Böhm organ uses subtractive synthesis for this purpose . The electronic tone generator (see blocking transducer ) generates - similar to the Moog synthesizer - output tones rich in overtones in sawtooth form. For the sound characteristics of the individual registers, these output tones are electrically filtered by so-called LC resonant circuits . This is a fundamental difference to the Hammond organ or similar instruments, whose tone generation is based on the addition of sinusoidal oscillations.
Instruments built up to 1974 can also be operated at different musical temperatures , as each of the twelve semitones can be individually tuned via its "main oscillator". By changing the tone generators of transistor circuits to modern integrated circuits , however, this opportunity was lost, the instruments were equal temperament .
In the course of time, due to the market demand for the Dr. Böhm organ, numerous additional modules and extensions were offered, which could also be retrofitted in the instrument by self-assembly. Based on the "pure teaching" of electronic church organ simulation, more and more additional effects were created that simulated the swing-in and swing-out behavior of natural instruments or attempted to approach the Hammond organ using sine drawbars and an electronically modeled Leslie cabinet . There were "electronic drums" (the term drum computer was not yet used), additional playing aids and even synthesizer and sampling assemblies.
One can therefore assume that every Dr. Böhm organ is an individual one-off piece with its own development history.
In its time, the Dr. Böhm organ was primarily used as a home organ or as an instrument for solo entertainers . However, specimens could also be found in smaller churches that served as a replacement for a pipe organ. There was even the four-manual GnT model especially for this purpose. But these organs were also used in pop music or jazz thanks to their many additional options that were optimized for them.
The artist Ady Zehnpfennig performed with organs from this manufacturer and made them famous.
In the mid-1980s, production of the analog Dr. Böhm organs slowly declined due to the development of digital sound generation systems - also in the same company. It was then abruptly shut down on the night of July 13, 1985 following a fire in the manufacturer's warehouse. Owners and enthusiasts of these earlier instruments will find large numbers of these models or replacement parts on the used market.
In April 2016 Keyswerk presented the "BÖHM Cloud Studio", an organ with an integrated PC and an additional 17.4 "touch display.
literature
- Rainer H. Böhm: Electronic organs and their self-construction (= Radio-Praktiker-Bücherei. Issue 101/102, ZDB -ID 1108351-7 ). Franzis-Verlag, Munich 1961 (2nd edition, ibid. 1963 (tube technology); 5th, completely revised and expanded edition, ibid. ISBN 3-7723-1015-X (transistor technology)).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Report in the journal Elrad 9/85
- ↑ BÖHM Cloud Studio - VST sound and multimedia on the BÖHM organ. (No longer available online.) April 1, 2016, archived from the original on May 23, 2016 ; accessed on May 23, 2016 .
Coordinates: 52 ° 17 '48.7 " N , 9 ° 3' 43.8" E