Leslie Speaker Motor Maintenance ~ Let's Fix That Keyboard

Julius just got himself a vintage Leslie speaker, a Leslie 760 from 1975. In this video he does basic maintenance for its upper motors.

Leslie speakers are an essential ingredient in Hammond organ (or any vintage organ) sound, and the organ really just doesn't sound the same or "right" without a Leslie speaker cabinet.

Hammond and Leslie were and still are two separate companies, and an interesting fact is that Laurens Hammond (the inventor of Hammond organ) actually hated the Leslie speaker sound and he tried his best to keep the Leslies as far away from his organs as possible. Well, Donald Leslie (the inventor of Leslie speakers) also hated the Hammond organs, so the feeling was mutual!! You can read more about Leslies here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_...

The consumers loved the combination, though, and eventually no-one, especially within the latter (post-early-1960s) jazz/soul/R&B/rock scene, would play a Hammond without a Leslie.

The "thing" with the Leslie cabinet is that it's a rotating speaker. Whereas in your ordinary guitar cabinet the speakers are stationary, in a Leslie the speakers (or some of them) are rotating. Different Leslie models have some different configurations, but the most common one is to have a bass woofer (usually a 15-inch) with a wooden rotor attached to it, and a horn-shaped tweeter, and both the rotor and the horn rotate throwing the sound 360 degrees around the cabinet, and thus generating a whirling stereo sound. The organ player can operate the rotating speed between the slow called "chorale", and the fast called "tremolo" (or choose to stop the rotating all together, but what's the fun in that??).

Julius' Leslie is a model 760, which is considered to be one of the most useful and the most powerful Leslie models. Unlike its older tube-amplified counterparts, the 760 includes two solid-state amplifiers, one for the horn and one for the woofer.

One thing to point out here is that no matter the Leslie model, they are big, bulky, and heavy! A Hammond organ is a pain-in-the-behind to carry around in its own right (some models require 4 athletes to move them), and a Leslie cabinet just adds to that. That's probably why you don't see them on live gigs that often anymore. Several manufacturers have tried to build smaller digital instruments to replace both a Hammond and a Leslie, and they are desperately trying to mimic the original sound, but frankly, there is no substitute for the real deal.

Back to the motors. In the configuration described above, the Leslie cabinet would actually have 4 motors: the slow and the fast motors for the treble horn, and the slow and the fast motors for the bass rotor. In this video Julius shows how to service the upper two motors. Initially it looks like one big motor, but they are actually two motors attached together.

The maintenance procedure includes cleaning, oiling, and changing all rubber O-rings and grommets. Hope this video helps all the Leslie owners out there!! Feel free to comment down below, if you have questions or remarks! Thanks!

– Julius