The latest generation of Clavia’s organ series introduces some pretty big changes.

Some years ago, Hammond tonewheel organ emulators — often called ‘clonewheels’ — achieved such a degree of realism that (by and large) only those who played them could hear any significant difference between the original instruments and the emulations. Nowadays, you can stick the likes of a Nord C2D or Hammond SKX Pro in a fake wooden case, and nobody in the audience will be able to tell whether you’re playing a fistful of zeros and ones or a menagerie of rotating thru’penny bits. But as players, we always want something new, something improved, something that woos us to hand over large wodges of cash for the promise of sounding better than ever before, and it’s this as much as anything that forces manufacturers to carry on developing existing product lines. If they didn’t, they would fall by the wayside and some other bunch of Herberts would then get their hands on your money. Consequently, and notwithstanding component obsolescence, I have no doubt Clavia would have loved to keep selling us C2s and C2Ds ad infinitum and avoid the costs of further development and tooling up for manufacturing a new instrument. But today we have the Organ 3, which replaces the previous models and promises numerous updates and improvements over them.

The Organ Models & Effects

The underlying Hammond emulation in the Organ 3 sounds to me to be very similar to, if not the same as, that in the latest C2 organs but with some useful enhancements to the surrounding technology. For example, the panel promises three overdrive types compared with the single type of the C2s (although the third isn’t yet implemented so we’ll have to wait to see what that offers). The existing two are less aggressive than before and, for me, are an improvement, offering a more organic growl when dialled in appropriately. There’s also a new ‘Deep’ mode within the Hammond chorus effect. This sounds similar to the chorus on my C2, so perhaps it’s the shallow mode that Clavia added. Either way, there are now more chorus/vibrato options, which can’t be a bad thing. The next enhancement is a Soft B3 option, which, at the touch of a button, removes the percussion, key click and leakage to produce the unsullied sound of the virtual tonewheels. If you’re looking for the cleanest representation of a tonewheel generator, this is a quick and easy way to obtain it.

Unlike its Hammond model, Clavia’s Vox and Farfisa emulations have not yet reached the point of convincing me that I’m listening to the original instruments. Indeed, I long ago stopped liberating my large, heavy and fragile Vox Continental II and Farfisa Compact Duo from storage to make detailed comparisons with modern instruments because the result was always that the emulations were Vox‑ish or Farfisa‑ish. But Clavia have promised an “updated Vox emulation” in the Organ 3, and a “fully revised Farfisa emulation, with improvements to the tone generators, filters and dynamic behaviours such as compression and key click”.

When testing the Vox model, I was surprised to find that the method for mixing the sine and triangle tones (which, traditionally, is achieved by pulling out two drawbars by the desired amounts) has been changed on the Organ 3. This offers a single drawbar with the pure sine wave at one extreme and the triangle at the other, which means that you can’t control the volume by pulling the waveform drawbars out by the desired amount; you can only control the waveform mix. I’m not sure that I like this. When compared with the C2D, there are also changes in the way that octaves ‘fold’ at the upper and lower extremes of the keyboard. (Mind you, the Continental II only had four‑octave keybeds and a more limited range of footages, so folding wasn’t an issue.) Ultimately, the Nord’s drawbars don’t reflect those of the original precisely but provide additional voicing options, which is good. Happily, the V3 chorus/vibrato setting does a pretty good job of emulating the original vibrato so, if you add some overdrive and use suitable EQ, you can approach the sound of the Conti. Nevertheless, I doubt that you’ll ever feel that you’ve perfectly imitated ‘I’m A Believer’ or ‘The House Of The Rising Sun’.

While the control mechanism remains the same as before — using the halfway point of a drawbar as a simulacrum of flicking a tab up or down — there are differences in the Farfisa model when comparing the C2D with the Organ 3. Most noticeably, the 16’ sounds fold on the C2 but don’t on the Organ 3, which means that you can now obtain greater bass extension. Unfortunately, as with previous Nords, the Organ 3 lacks the Multi Tone Booster tabs that generated the Farfisa’s most aggressive and instantly recognisable sounds. To be fair, the underlying tone can be subtly brighter on the new model, which is a good thing, but the Organ 3 remains too polite to be completely convincing. Sixty‑year‑old Farfisa Compacts tend to be brash lumps of noisy, distort‑y gnarliness, whereas emulations always sound to me as if they’ve been to a Swiss finishing school, joined the local yacht club, and would never be seen serving biscuits without a doily.

Now we come to something that Clavia don’t boast about in their marketing materials. The lovely sample‑based Pipe Organ of the C2 and C2D has been reduced to a single, modelled Principal (diapason) sound. You can add ranks using the drawbars to create a range of registrations, and the onboard EQ can help you to obtain a brassier sound, but the Flutes, Trumpets, Vox Celeste, Nazards and all of the others nestling in the C2 series have been discarded. I was hugely disappointed when I discovered this, so I asked the Product Specialists at Clavia why they had done it. They told me that the company had dispensed with the sampled pipe organ sounds to focus the Organ 3 on the Hammond, Vox and Farfisa organ models, and to simplify the control panel. Hmm... you could simplify my car’s dashboard by removing the multi‑speaker sound system and the air conditioning, and I wouldn’t like that either. Unfortunately, even the surviving sound isn’t perfect because it exhibits aliasing at the top end. All in all, you can treat the Organ 3 as a pipe‑organ‑free zone. You might wonder if this has any relevance to rock & roll but, while writing this review, I watched a performance of Bonobo performing ‘Otomo’ live at the Royal Albert Hall with Anna Lapwood playing the mighty ‘Voice Of Jupiter’ organ. The same evening, I also watched a recording of Yes’ classic track ‘Awaken’, in which the Nord C2D pipe organ worked as a perfect replacement for the genuine pipe organ played on the album. Whether it’s dance or prog, there’s a place for pipe organs in modern music.

Happily, the flexibility of the bass pedal sounds has gone in the other (ie. good) direction. The C2 generated appropriate pedal sounds depending upon the organ model chosen but, on the Organ 3, you can choose which model you would like to play at any given moment. I suspect that the Trek II and Moog Taurus options will find many uses. Happily, there’s also an FX Bypass button in this section, so you can apply the Leslie effect to the organ manuals while your bass pedals remain unmolested.

The next bunch of changes lie in the various effects. Clavia say that the Organ 3 includes a new rotary speaker emulation that promises “further increased resolution for the Rotary Speaker horn and bass rotor model”. Since I had no idea what that meant, I asked the Product Specialists who responded that this relates to the amount of detail in the frequency domain (I’m not sure that that’s much clearer) and how closely the model matches the sound and behaviour of the original speaker. Whatever the explanation, it sounds nice so I’m not complaining. The other significant change here is the replacement of the previous three rotary speaker models — two Leslie 122s and a Leslie 145 — with a single model that offers five microphone positioning options.

The delay effect has also been updated, and you can apply this to the upper manual or the whole instrument, which makes it possible to play psychedelic Pink Floyd solos on the upper manual while obtaining clean accompaniments on the lower. Perhaps even more significant are the improvements to the reverb section. There’s now a Chorale mode that choruses the ‘wet’ signal, and a spring model that, when wanted, you can place before the rotary speaker effect. I’ve been crying out for the second of these for as long as I’ve been reviewing digital organs because the sound of a reverberated signal passing through a rotary speaker is quite different from the sound of the same speaker in a reverberant space.

The final upgrade in the existing effects sections is an additional amp model. As always, the name alludes to its inspiration without being specific. Which British tube amp and 4x12 speaker do you think that they mean?

Clavia have also added a modulation effects section derived from its other product families, and this allows you to apply a phaser, flanger, chorus, tremolo or ring modulation to the upper manual or the whole instrument. The amount of control is sparse (just rate and amount) so these effects would be more useful if they offered at least the same degree of control as a stompbox, but they sound fine within their limits.

In Use

I’m not going to discuss the minutiae of things such as inputs and outputs (other than to say that the new auxiliary output, which can carry the bass sound separately from the rest, is a notable improvement), the patch memories or the updated method for controlling registrations using the LED‑equipped drawbars, mostly because I don’t have the space. Nonetheless, there are a few other aspects of the Organ 3 that deserve mention.

The first is its shape; while it’s of similar size and weight to its predecessors, it’s an inch wider. This may not sound like much, but it means that it won’t fit into a hard C1 or C2 flightcase unless you terrify the foam with a Stanley knife. Similarly, while the panel is similar to that of the C2D, you won’t be able to jump instantly from the older model to the newer because many of the common controls have moved. I don’t want to overstate this; if you can use a C2D, you should be comfortable with the Organ 3 in a day or two, but don’t forget which model you’re playing or you could find yourself grabbing the wrong wotsit.

Inexplicably, Clavia describe the Organ 3’s screen as a “large OLED display”. Don’t be silly. The screen on my OASYS is (by keyboard standards) large; the one on the Organ 3 is tiny but, nonetheless, a step up from previous Nord organs, and the new menus are much quicker and simpler to navigate than before, so let’s be grateful and overlook the hyperbole.

As on earlier models, the manuals have a High trigger mode that imitates the response of a vintage Hammond organ, but you can’t select the High mode for local playing and simultaneously use Normal mode for playing external MIDI devices as you could on the Nord C1. What’s more, there’s no emulation of the slightly staggered activation of the drawbar pitches that occurs when you depress the keys slowly on the likes of an A100, B3 or C3. Some alternatives to the Nord are now offering this and, while it’s a minor detail, it would be nice to see it here. It’s also worth noting that, as on previous models, MIDI velocity appears to be sent and received, but the manual isn’t clear about this. It says, “Note On and Note Off messages are transmitted and received. Velocity is included if the related MIDI menu setting is set accordingly,” but there’s no relevant menu in the current OS. Having said that, the Organ 3 operating system has only reached version 0.98 at the time of writing, which suggests that it’s still a work in progress that hasn’t even achieved the v1.00 status normally afforded to initial releases. Hopefully, this will have been sorted out by the time that you read this.

Finally, I feel obliged to note that pressure sensitivity (aftertouch) is not provided. You may wonder why I would want aftertouch on an organ, but I find it useful for controlling things such as the rotary speaker speed when I have neither hands nor feet free for pushing buttons, switching switches or stomping on pedals.

Conclusions

The Nord C1 proved to­­ be a great success in the ’00s, overshadowing serious competition including the Korg BX3, the Roland VK‑88 and the Viscount/Oberheim OB5. The series then retained its eminence with the C2 and then the C2D. But the competition is tougher today, and includes the similarly‑priced Hammond SKX Pro (SOS August 2022) and Viscount Legend Soul 261, as well as the top‑of‑the‑range dual‑manual version of the Hammond XK5, all of which have fans who find them superior to Clavia’s offerings. So I fear that this was the wrong time for Clavia to be amputating bits. I would have been tempted to retain all of the facilities of the C2D and then added other organ models — say, the Hammond L100 series — and maybe some Nord Sample Synth capabilities that would have made it a far more flexible instrument without diluting the original concept. The ability to assign a different organ model to each manual would also have been a significant improvement, but I’ve asked Clavia’s Product Specialists about this before and, perhaps because of technical limitations, it has never reached their to‑do list.

So, will I be upgrading to the Organ 3? No, I value the pipe organ in my C2 too highly. But would I sell a C2 or C2D and upgrade to the Organ 3 if I didn’t use the pipe organ? If I’m honest, probably not. While there’s no doubt that the Organ 3 looks slightly more attractive, has slightly improved tonewheel and transistor organ sounds and is a slightly nicer instrument to use, I don’t find that the differences would justify selling what was, until recently, the ‘ultimate’ clonewheel organ and then having to find another couple of grand to buy the latest model. So perhaps a better question to ask is whether I would choose the Organ 3 if I was buying for the first time. That’s a trickier one. I’ve not played the Viscounts, so I’m not in a position to comment on them, but I know the Hammonds well and the SKX Pro, while perhaps less elegant than the Organ 3, is a superb stage instrument with hugely configurable organ engines plus additional synths and an array of advanced features that the Nord lacks.

These iconic red slabs of Swedish engineering have become deeply trusted, and there’s a great deal to be said for being confident that your instrument will do exactly what you ask, day in and day out for years to come.

Then there’s the issue of price. When the C2 appeared it cost around £2200$2500 and boasted four organs that therefore cost around £550$625 each. Today, the Organ 3 costs around £3200$4500 and offers just three organs (I don’t include the gutted pipe organ) for nearly £1100around $1500 each. To be fair, inflation accounts for much of this increase but, on this basis, the Organ 3 is still more expensive in real terms that its predecessors. You might therefore wonder whether it can carve a niche for itself in today’s marketplace. Despite everything, I believe that it can and will. Over the past 30 years, these iconic red slabs of Swedish engineering have become deeply trusted, and there’s a great deal to be said for being confident that your instrument will do exactly what you ask, day in and day out for years to come. Nevertheless, I recommend that you try the alternatives before splashing any cash. You currently have a choice of at least four excellent instruments, and that can’t be a bad thing. If you stick to the Hammond emulation then, whichever you choose, the audience need never know that you’re not playing the ‘real thing’.

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