Hammond XK-5 Organ

Hammond XK-5 Portable Organ

Nothing sounds like an original Hammond B-3—but they’e expensive, fragile, heavy and increasingly difficult to maintain (much less, take on the road). So the engineers at Hammond have gone back to the original blueprints to create a lightweight, stunningly accurate and ultra-reliable alternative: the Hammond XK-5. Calling it the “new original,” the XK-5 captures the sound and feel of the legendary B-3 and Leslie speaker with amazing accuracy. 

Some of the new technologies that have gone into the XK-5 include:

Hybrid Multi-Key Contact System
Classic Hammond organs had 9 mechanical contacts per key (one for each drawbar harmonic)—very different from the single MIDI ‘note-on’ used on most other organs and synths. The XK-5 uses 3 mechanical contacts per key, each triggering 3 virtual contacts, giving you 9 separate note-ons for an authentic, pressure-sensitive playing experience.

Custom Keybed
Built entirely in-house, the XK-5 keybed is designed to duplicate the authentic heft, bounce and key dip of a “new old stock” B-3. It includes the “waterfall” key fronts crucial for palm slides and other classic playing techniques. 

New Sound Engine
Painstaking modeling and sampling have recreated all 96 spinning electro-mechanical discs from the original tone wheel generator, along with other important sonic details such as key click, harmonic percussion and vibrato-chorus. Even deeper programability allows players to reconstruct classic Hammonds right down to the model, year, condition and serial number. (Expect downloadable tone wheel profiles of famous organists’ instruments in the near future.)

Matching Transformer:
In classic Hammond organs, all signals from the upper, lower, and pedal manuals passed through a matching transformer ahead of the preamp, creating a saturation that enhanced the organ’s “breathy” character. In the XK-5, this is modeled and adjustable.

Additional Features

• 4 full sets of Harmonic Drawbars (plus pedal drawbars), as on original Hammond console organs
• 12 additional virtual tone wheels for complex pedal tones
• Latest-generation Digital Leslie effect (improved to use continuously-variable speed)
• Dedicated octave shift/transpose buttons
• Improved DSP-based overdrive complemented by vacuum tube preamp
• Improved vibrato-chorus
• Dedicated on/off buttons and amount knobs for reverb, overdrive, and assignable multi-FX
• Lower B drawbars can alternately control 9 MIDI control messages for external gear
• Left and right ¼” outs can be used at the same time as Leslie output.
• More key-triggering modes for pedal-to-lower coupler (Manual Bass function)
• Firmware updatable via USB flash drive or directly from computer
• Crisp new OLED display—more readable under different lighting conditions
• 46.8” (W) 15.8” (D) 4.7” (H)
• Weight:  34.6 lbs.