Product Description
Korg CX3 Drawbar Organ
A great sounding organ
About This Keyboard
This CX3 is in excellent condition both functionally and cosmetically. With just a couple of small scratches here and there you'd have a hard time finding a nicer looking CX3. This is about as close as you can get to the sound of a Hammond B3 without putting out thousands of dollars. We're including a power cord and nice padded case.
This from Sound on Sound
The name may be the same as their old 1980 model, but the new Korg CX3 now employs physical modelling techniques in in the eternal quest for the classic Hammond/Leslie sound. Gordon Reid finds out if it measures up to the real thing.
In 1980, there were three ways to sound like you were playing a Hammond tonewheel organ through a Leslie speaker. The first was to play a Hammond tonewheel organ through a Leslie speaker. The second and third were to play a Korg CX3 or BX3 through a Leslie speaker.
You may think that all '70s and '80s combo organs were horrible, cheesy affairs and, for the most part, you would be right. Efforts such as the Roland VK1 and VK9, or the ghastly organ settings in Yamaha's multi‑keyboards certainly support this view. More alluring, and a cut above their Far Eastern brethren, Crumar's Italian jobs were better, and usable within a mix. But the Korgs came close to emulating the true depth and passion of a vintage Hammond. Indeed, in today's inflated market, a dual manual BX3 in good condition will cost you more than a real Hammond such as an L100 or M100. Oh, all right, so it's still a fraction of the price of a C3 or the unaccountably more expensive B3, but that's another story...
Anyway, last July, Korg's UK product specialists asked me if I would like to play a CX3. As you might imagine, I was somewhat bemused. They know that I still have a BX3, so why would they think I would be interested in its single‑manual little brother? The answer, of course, is that they were not inviting me to play a CX3. They were inviting me to try the (at the time) unannounced new Korg CX3.
On The Outside...
Now, as we turn 2001 (the real millennium, chaps... not the marketing managers' fiasco of 12 months ago) the new CX3 has arrived, and there's no doubting what it is. Even if you ignore the giveaway drawbars, its wooden case and vintage styling reek of Hammond. It's heavy, too, and certainly more so than your average 61‑note digital synthesizer. But despite the CX3's appearance, its heart is pure digital, and beats to a system that Korg call... well, it doesn't seem to have a name. Korg simply call it a 'tone wheel organ modelling tone generator' and, since there's no pronounceable acronym to be had (I doubt that 'TWOMTG' counts) the company seems to have declined to name the technology in any way. Not that Korg are blind to the need for a silly name: the effects are modelled by REMS: the "Resonant structure and Electronic circuit Modelling System".
Of course, all of this is tucked away where the sun doesn't shine whereas, on the surface, the CX3 presents you with something that looks much like... a single‑manual Hammond. There are two sets of drawbars, controls for percussion, overdrive, chorus/vibrato, reverb and Leslie effects, all complemented by the rather more contemporary display, patch selectors, and editing controls.
...Looking In
As you would expect from its name, the voicing on the CX3 emulates that of a Hammond C3, but with many additional tweaks, courtesy of its DSP. In the manual, although not in the Edit menu itself, Korg have divided the parameters into eight groups. You select these by entering Edit Mode, and then pressing the 'shortcuts' — the patch buttons 1 to 8 — which take you to the start of each group. Alternatively, you can also step left or right through the whole single‑tier edit table if you prefer. This is the system that Korg first introduced on the M1, and it's very usable.
By and large, the edit groups divide the instrument into logical chunks — voicing, effects, controllers, and so on — so I can give you a good idea of what's going on by giving you a guided tour of the groups themselves. So let's begin with the first three...
The first defines the nature of the virtual organ within a patch, determining the character of the sounds that it will produce, even before you start to manipulate the drawbars, or add effects. For example, you can select whether the tonewheels have leakage (the 'Vintage' setting) or not ('Clean'). There are also parameters for the overtone level, the amount of leakage, and levels for the clicks that naturally occur when you press or release a key on a vintage Hammond.
The second determines the drawbar settings stored in the patch. There are two sets of drawbars, but, rather than being labelled 'Upper' and 'Lower' in traditional fashion, these simply emblazoned '1' and '2'. At first this may seem a bit weird because, in what Korg call Normal mode, the two sets act traditionally and determine the sound of the Upper and Lower sound generators either side of a key‑split (or on the upper and lower manuals when an external MIDI keyboard provides the missing manual). However, as well as being labelled '2', the second set of drawbars is also annotated 'EX Drawbar' and 'EX Percussion'. There's something strange going on here, and it's time that we took a large detour...
EX‑Panded? EX‑Tended? EX‑Cellent?
The CX3 has two playing modes: the aforementioned Normal and EX, and it's to the second of these that EX Drawbar and EX Percussion refer.
Simply stated, EX Drawbar allows you to add four further drawbars — and, therefore, four further pitches — to the standard nine provided by most drawbar Hammonds. The range of these extends in semitones from G4 to C7 (the 24th harmonic) where the reference is C5, the reference pitch of the 1' drawbar. Once set, you control these harmonics (although, strictly speaking, they are not necessarily harmonics) using the first four drawbars in the second set.
You program the pitches of the EX Drawbars in Global mode, which offers four memories (or Types) that you can access wherever you program an EX patch. Now, you may think that this is all a bit of Korg‑y extravagance, but there are precedents for extended Hammond registrations. For example, a handful of Hammond Spinet organs offered a single drawbar that controlled the 10th and 12th harmonics (1' is the eighth harmonic) on the lower manual. Nevertheless, it's a rare and unusual facility, and it makes the CX3 capable of some excellent sounds.
The second facility in EX mode uses the remaining five drawbars in the '2' group. You cannot program these, so what you're given is what you get. And what you're given is five more percussion settings lying at 4' or 2 2/3', (depending upon the status of a button in the Percussion controls on the far right of the panel) 16', 5 1/3', and at the pitches determined for the first two EX drawbars. I've never seen this on an organ — Hammond or otherwise — but very welcome it is. Indeed, I believe that, 65 years after the introduction of the original, Korg have actually improved upon the 'algorithm' of the tonewheel organ. There's just one shortcoming to EX mode. Because it demands so much more of the CX3's DSP, it limits you to just the 'Upper' registration, with the Lower being disabled.
You can use the drawbars 'live' in either Normal or EX mode. However (and this is where we return to our discussion of the parameters in the second edit group, from which we diverged a few paragraphs ago) you can save your registrations in any of the 64 Normal memories (eight patches by eight banks) or the 64 EX memories, as appropriate.
There's one extra parameter in Group 2, and it will be responsible for numerous furrowed brows over the next few months. In Normal mode it enables/disables percussion on the Upper registration. Consequently, even when the top panel controls tell you that percussion should be 'on', there are many times when it isn't. Beware.
This brings us neatly to the third edit group, which is the percussion itself. There are five parameters here. The first two control the percussion level, and the amount by which it is quieter when you select 'Soft'. The third depresses the level of the continuous voice when percussion is 'on' and not 'soft', further accentuating the percussion if required. The fourth and fifth parameters determine the decay speeds for the 'fast' and 'slow' percussion settings. Simple.
Of course, the classic sound of the Hammond is as much a consequence of the effects, amplifier and Leslie speaker system as it is of the organ itself. Consequently, it doesn't matter how good the basic sounds are if the effects treatments aren't up to the job.
The first such effect is the chorus/vibrato which, as on the original, is not editable. You choose which of the seven options — V1, C1, V2, C2, V3, C3, or Off — you want, and leave it at that. That leaves three further treatments, corresponding to each of the stages through which the sound passes when you play a Hammond C3. These are: reverb, amplification, and the rotating speaker effect. Edit groups four to six control these.
Group 4 determines the type of amplifier you use for your sound. In broad outline, Type 1 is clean, Type 2 is more 'driven' with greater high frequency content, and 'Preamp' is the equivalent of a direct line out of the sound generator. I describe these as broad outlines because the next four parameters allow you to adjust a 3‑band treble/mid/bass EQ, and adjust the gain of Types 1 and 2. This is where you'll generate (according to taste) the characteristic purr or distortion of your favorite Hammond sounds.
Group 5 sets the reverb parameters. The first three of these are trivial: Reverb type (room, hall and plate), Reverb time, and Reverb mix level. The fourth is not so trivial. Well... it is to operate, because there are only two settings, but you have to make a decision. Do you want the reverb to occur before the Leslie speaker algorithm (as it would on the many Hammonds equipped with spring reverbs) or do you intend to recreate the ambience of a room or hall? If the former, you set the routing to 'Rev ‑> Rot'. If the latter, set it to 'Rot ‑> Rev'.
On the face of it, the reverb is all fine and hunky dory, but there is a serious omission here. Since the entire raison d'être of the CX3 is to imitate the Hammond C3, where's the spring reverb setting? Hammond reverbs were springs, not plates. What's going on?
With that problem duly noted, we can now move on to Group 6, the parameters that affect the rotary speaker emulation. There are 17 speaker parameters (see box below) and they cover all the aspects of miking up a twin‑rotor Leslie such as a 122RV. If you want to bypass the Leslie algorithm, you set the amp type to 'Preamp', leaving an unaffected signal that you can treat with external units, as desired.
The penultimate group, number 7, contains all the bits and pieces that you might want to use in live performance. Many of these relate to the pedals that you can use to augment the CX3, so let's take a quick look round the back to see what's available.
In addition to the expected stereo outputs and MIDI In, Out and Thru, the CX3 boasts three pedal inputs. The first of these takes a continuous controller pedal, and there are parameters in the Normal, EX and Global modes (see page 204 for more on the latter) that define its action. Next to this, you'll find a pair of sockets that will each take either an on/off pedal, or another continuous controller. Since all the Hammonds worth discussing have swell (volume) pedals, I'm not surprised that the CX3 has these. What's surprising is that Korg clearly intended to supply a continuous controller pedal with the CX3, but decided — at some late stage after the manual was printed — not to do so. This is a shame, but none of the other manufacturers does it, so I can't be too critical.
Now let's return to Group 7. Firstly, and quite incongruous on an organ, there are on/off Hold functions (sustain pedals) for both the Upper and Lower sound generators. You can also use on/off pedals for switching the keyboard split on and off, braking and releasing the Leslie effect, and switching between the fast and slow speeds of the Leslie. Continuous controller pedals modify the Reverb Mix and Amp Gain between user‑defined minimum and maximum values. Yet more parameters define the keyboard split point itself, with user‑defined octave shifts on either side.
Finally, Korg gift the patch‑rename option with a Group all of its own.
It is important to remember that when buying a used keyboard it may not operate or look exactly like a new one. Used keyboards develop wear over time that can cause such items as function buttons, knobs, sliders etc. to fail to operate as smoothly or easily as when they were new. Our technician does check these items and if they are deemed unusable they are replaced but some function buttons may require more pressure or manipulation to make the appropriate changes. Cosmetically your used keyboard may have scuffs, scratches, cracks to plastic pieces, discolored keys or other visual impairments that might not show up in the photos. We try to mention any obvious visual imperfections but may not consider them serious enough to post in the listing.