rotating speaker alternative

[drumsound]

Those old Califones were beasts! I used to run a high school AV department back in the '70s and we had a bunch of those Califones as well as Wollensac cassette machines...not particularly hi-fi stuff but capable of surviving a thermonuclear explosion! As I recall the old Leslies, which every roadie hated - they weighed a ton, did not have any slip rings; the rotating horns/baffles were positioned over stationary speakers.

Yeah, tube Leslies with the wood cabinet were meant to be put in the home or church and stay there. The later SS models with tolex are easer to cart around.

The Leslie woofer fired into a moving baffle, similar to the second Scodiddly made. The tweeter was actually in one of the top horns, the other is only there for balance.

Obviously the first version did something interesting to make you make V2. So what was the sound like, in general and compared to a Leslie?

So thinking about it more, I guess it would have sounded like a frequency-dependent tremolo. Lows would go around the baffle, highs would fade up and down. The stereo version would be like a frequency-dependent autopanner - lows in mono, highs swishing from side to side. There would of course be some effect from the reflections off the baffle, too.

That actually sounds like it would be quite cool for the right thing. OOOhs and AAAAHss, and backing vocals in general.

[floid]

I did a thing a few years ago with a turntable between the speaker and the mic. On the turntable was a flat wall, so that as the turntable spun it would be blocking or not. Later I made more of a baffle, like a bundle of square wooden tubes. You could put multiple mics around it for stereo and beyond.

Hey, I found one of those animated gifs I used to make!
Rotor-card.gif

I remember this, it inspired me to try to make one similar. I didn't get a very strong effect off of mine tho.

[digitaldrummer]

I might just take a fan out to my studio...

[Scodiddly]

I did a thing a few years ago with a turntable between the speaker and the mic. On the turntable was a flat wall, so that as the turntable spun it would be blocking or not. Later I made more of a baffle, like a bundle of square wooden tubes. You could put multiple mics around it for stereo and beyond.

Hey, I found one of those animated gifs I used to make!
Rotor-card.gif

I remember this, it inspired me to try to make one similar. I didn't get a very strong effect off of mine tho.

Just in the room it didn't sound like much. With a microphone on the other side there was more of an effect.

[drumsound]

Found an image of the Mark II version:

Califone-stereo.jpg

Awesome!!!

It's not hard to find single rotor leslie baffles pulled from old home organs. They're basically a styrofoam version of your Mark 2 turntable leslie. I had one for a while and it did an ok job. There's no horn but you get some of the effect.

I also used to have a very old Everett Orgatron. It was a reed organ with a pick-up system and amplifier. If I'm not mistaken Wurlitzer bought the patent on the pick-up system and used it for their electric pianos. Anyway, it had a similar tremelo system to the first version of your turntable leslie. There was a board on a spindle in front of the speaker. The board would spin and give an effect midway between trem and a leslie.
I miss that organ. It sounded fantastic and unlike anything else I've ever had. Unfortunately all the lights in the studio would dim when you turned it on and one day it caught fire.

Oh, man. I assume the fire wasn't large and was contained quickly, but still...

[Nick Sevilla]

I seem to recall a radio special about Yes (from the bygone days when radio specials about bands were kind of a thing) where they said that one of the band members spun a corded mic around over his head during recording in an attempt to get some sort of Leslie-ish sound. I don't know how it worked out, but it does sound like fun.

Slip rings look cool. I have a couple of old home stereo horns lying around somewhere that I've always wanted to experiment with, & those look perfect for the job.

I worked with them, and did try a thing with Jon, mostly to prove it could have worked. I used a hypercardioid mic, while they likely originally had tried with a cardioid. And I swung it at his eye level, at a distance of about 4-5 feet away from him, while he sang stationary. No, we did not use it for anything, it was just a test.

[Nick Sevilla]

You could jury rig a circular railing with bearings, smooth and well oiled ones, using a silent electric motor,
as silent as possible anyways, and have the mic inside the frame, with its null cancelling most of the motor noise.

[drumsound]

You could jury rig a circular railing with bearings, smooth and well oiled ones, using a silent electric motor,
as silent as possible anyways, and have the mic inside the frame, with its null cancelling most of the motor noise.

Yeah, but who's got the space for such a contraption?

[digitaldrummer]

then there is the tale of John Lennon asking Geoff Emerick to swing him around a microphone... (I do recall reading it in the Emerick book too)

https://www.910pr.com/2018/10/5-times-g ... es-in.html

but once again, the Leslie proves to be safer.

[Nick Sevilla]

You could jury rig a circular railing with bearings, smooth and well oiled ones, using a silent electric motor,
as silent as possible anyways, and have the mic inside the frame, with its null cancelling most of the motor noise.

Yeah, but who's got the space for such a contraption?

Well, if you look at a Leslie speaker cabinet, you'd only need around the same space, minus the height.
Say a 2' radius rail. Not cheap, but doable.

[floid]

Watch this reel
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/TuVBT6 ... tid=D5vuiz

[vvv]

I might just take a fan out to my studio...

..., buy 'em a drink, ...

[trodden]

Watch this reel
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/TuVBT6 ... tid=D5vuiz

Hell Yeah!