Intro To Jazz Organ Course

Welcome to our ‘Intro To Hammond Organ’ course.

This course has been designed for students who are new to the Hammond organ and those who are interested in learning about the intricacies of this unique instrument.

Many of the theoretical concepts covered in the course are applicable to blues and jazz piano students. We explore walking bass lines, comping, improvisation, turnarounds, and finally we will apply all of these concepts to create a full performance over the 12 Bar Jazz Blues in F.

The Anatomy Of The Hammond B3 Organ

We start this course by exploring the anatomy of the Hammond B3 organ. We discuss the manuals, drawbars, presets, pedals, percussion circuit, & chorus vibrato settings.

Walking Bass On The Hammond

Walking bass is the most common type of bass that you will hear in jazz and jazz blues on the organ. For jazz organists, walking bass is played primarily with the left hand on the lower manual with some elements added and supported by the bass pedals.

Walking bass on the lower manual gives us a greater ability to articulate notes than walking with just the bass pedals.

Pedal Thumps & Bass Lines

The pedal thump is a low frequency thump that is used to accent the beginning of the notes in our bass line. When playing the bass pedals on Hammond organ, we generally alternate between playing pitch-less pedal thumps with following the melodic contour of the bass line that we are walking on the lower manual.

Hammond Drawbar Settings For Comping

Most Hammond organ comping uses the lower manual with the same drawbar setting that we used for our left hand bass lines. We’re lucky that the same setting is great for comping and for bass lines as we can walk bass and comp on the same drawbar preset.

Useful Drawbar Registrations

We start with some useful drawbar registrations that are commonly used in jazz organ for right hand soloing and improvisation.

• Jimmy Smith Registration — full version and “nasal” version
• Charles Earland Registration
• Groove Holmes Registration
• Erroll Garner Registration & Squabbling
• Full Organ Registration

The Blues Scale & Chord Tones

Robert demonstrates a framework for constructing idiomatic-sounding blues improvised phrases:

• The departure
• The middle part
• The arrival or resolution

The arrival moves out of the blues scale into a chord tone and amounts to a release of tension in the phrase.

Turnarounds For F Blues

We look at the structure of 12-bar blues and explore some of the embellishments you can use on the chord progression.

We start with a fairly basic jazz blues chord progression as the basis for our embellishments and gradually layer in more harmonically interesting chords and cadences.