i'm always amazed how these things sound great, and I mean, $2,000 boutique amp great... I have one of these and the other one that has the actual preamp tubes... and about four other ones... lol... they all sound amazing... better character and versatility than the "regular" amps I have here... lol... I repair hammonds for a living and always running into these... and all of them are the best amps I have.. and I have some truly great guitar amps too! but these kill them!
I got several Hammond L100 series amps and a couple of M3s, over the years. One of the L100s I got in a purchase of that and 2 tube PAs for about $30 total. The others were all free organs that people locally were getting rid of and just wanted someone to come haul them off. I used to part them out and sell the pieces. Normally getting rid of the organ bodies would be a big problem, but my cousin used to own a restaurant and he'd let me throw them in his dumpster. :-) The L100s make really amazing Marshall 18 amps. Have one of each (AO-43 & AO-29). Don't see Hammond organs much on Craigslist anymore :-( Too bad. They were good money.
I tried once, first, to rescue an ntire M100. A dude in the most rural place in CT was literally gonna throw it away, offered it to me when we'd been bullshitting about guitars on a forum somewhere. He even told me the names of several famous people who used the same model in the studio (as if I needed convincing). So, dad had a truck, and the guy had a forklift, getting it ON the truck was no problem, we just had to push from one end and pull and guide from the other, then tie it with ratchet straps. It was trying to wheel it down my homemade ramp that was the problem. After 2 hours of hurting ourselves, we both looked at each other and said "it's time." We stepped back and let it land. It toppled multiple times. The tonewheels and start motor already needed work, so I'd planned on having the amps and speakers (2 P12s and a P8) as a backup plan to make it worth the trip. It was worth the trip. Basically all I did with the AO-44 is exactly what you did without the adding in a pedal up front part. I just jumped the input hot lead to the grid of the first tube, because that stuff at the beginning is all to make it dark, otherwise the reverb tank would feed back a bit. The transistor was an afterthought, the other reverb amps in Hammonds don't have that. But I ripped out the stuff the transistor was there to push through, so I ripped out the transistor too. Oh, and I also disconnected the NFB loop. Mine is, as a result, even louder and brighter than yours. I love it though, I have a Seymour Duncan Twin Tube Classic, which is a little on the dark side if you push it beyond a moderate dad-rock crunch, but it sounds pretty well balanced through my stripped down AO-44. I'm terrified to add a tone stack unless it can be something dead simple, fully passive and maybe with a relay that would bypass it completely if it's annoying me one day. I considered adding a 12ax7, the PT is more than capable of handling one or two or 4 additional tubes. But again, I am afraid to ruin it. I'd need to set it up to be easy to revert it back to how it is.
@@stratokev2 𝘚𝘪𝘨𝘩..... The main injury that day was frustration at having worn ourselves out just to end up failing to get it down safely anyway. It was like slow motion, once that thing went down and flipped over. The inside of the cabinet is like a time-capsule though, speakers and amps are almost always good.
