VOX CONTINENTAL ORGAN MANUAL
VOX CONTINENTAL ORGAN FULL
VOX CONTINENTAL ORGAN SIMULATOR

You could mix the sine waves with the triangle waves by pulling out both maroon bars, but the bright triangles would overpower the sines, so all the sine bar really did in that context was add a little extra depth to the tone. Pull out the triangle bar, and all the white drawbars produced much brighter triangle type waves.

Pull out the sine bar, and all the white drawbars produced sine waves – roughly similar to the Hammond tone, but ineitably with a much more ‘electronic’ quality. With both maroon bars pushed right in to zero, there was no sound at all. Per manual, there was one maroon bar for sine waves, and one for triangle waves. The Continental II’s maroon-tipped bars were really not drawbars at all, but master volume controls.

VOX CONTINENTAL ORGAN FULL

Because this pitch was inseparable from the 1 3/5’ pitch it was grouped with, the seminal Hammond jazz tone (produced with a tonewheel organ’s first three bars full out) was impossible to get. Fans of classic Hammond sounds should note that one of the pitches Vox grouped into a set combination on the Continental II was the 5 1/3’. Vox grouped some pitches together – presumably to save on space and hardware. The Hammond system was strictly one pitch per drawbar. The white-tipped bars essentially did what Hammond drawbars did, except they had the potential to produce a brighter and more complex tone, and some bars were alloted more than one pitch. The Continental II sported white-tipped and maroon-tipped bars. The Vox drawbar system was different from that of the Hammond.

VOX CONTINENTAL ORGAN SIMULATOR

The Vox Continental is the only keyboard I’ve ever had which needs to go through a guitar speaker simulator for direct injection recording. Feed one into a stereo or directly to a mixing desk and you get overwhelming and frankly quite ridiculous levels of treble with all drawbars out. They accordingly have a very strong treble bias. These organs were built to sound toppy through a valve (guitar type) amp – which naturally lacks the highest frequencies. I later covered the grey top with material, which I thought looked much better than the rather cheap matt finish of the original lid. The model I bought was in fact a Continental Super II, with percussion and a grey top, as opposed to the regular orange-top Continental II, which came minus the perc section.

VOX CONTINENTAL ORGAN MANUAL

The Continental II is a twin manual expansion on the single-manual Vox Continental, and the Continental II moniker alone ties the product to the mid 1960s, giving it a year of birth between 19. I loved the fast vibrato, and keyboard parts from the original material I was playing on stage at the time worked brilliantly. The personality was extremely lively and the vibrato rate was set much faster than on the Continental IIs I'd heard on record. I did know about rotary speakers by this time, so I knew I wasn't going to get the sound I'd heard on Rock Goes to College, but playing the organ for the first time in the shop I still found it really exciting. But even by ’86 I hadn’t done much homework on Vox organs, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. I was alerted to the presence of this organ by a guitarist mate, who knew what my tastes were and thought I’d be interested. I bought it from a small and now long, long gone shop in West Bromwich (near Birmingham, England), called Musicstore. I just saw the organ, with the reverse black/white keys, and thought: When I grow up, I’m gonna get one of those…Īnd on Monday 11th August 1986, I did. I didn’t know anything about rotary speakers at the time. However, in the new year of 1980, I saw a televised Rock Goes to College performance by The Specials (from the Colchester Institute in Essex), in which Jerry Dammers was using a Vox Continental through a rotary speaker. I liked the music, but didn’t particularly pick up on the organ sound with the first Madness stuff. The debut Madness album was actually the first LP I ever bought with my pocket money (ah, pocket money – they were the days), and it was absolutely deluged with the bold, toppy tones of the Vox. I missed out on the original wave of bands who used the Vox Continental II, so my introduction to the model came in the late ‘70s, when keyboardists such as Steve Nieve (The Attractions), Jerry Dammers (The Specials) and Mike Barson (Madness), used it extensively. When someone generically refers to a ‘60s organ, by and large, it’s this instrument or one of its relatives they’ll be talking about.

Vox continental organ