Spring Morning, Intro and Sponsor

Geoff 0:00

Hello Podcats. It's Geoff Gascoyne here. Hope you're well? Today it's a beautiful spring morning, and I'm in north London. I mean, Dollis Hill. Somewhere I've never been to before. And I'm gonna see a lovely man called Pete Whittaker. Pete is primarily known as an organist, so we're gonna talk all things draw bars and organs. So I'm looking forward to it.

Announcement 0:59

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Inside Pete’s Hammond C3 Setup

Geoff 1:15

I love an organ. Yeah. Hey Pete, you alright?

Pete 1:18

Yeah, not bad, thank you.

Geoff 1:19

Yes, I'm in your organ room here. Tell me about this organ, it's gorgeous.

Pete 1:23

It's a Hammond C3 from about the same vintage as me, I think. Mid-60s. I thought it was ever so expensive when I've I got it. I bought it with a load of Leslies and another little Hammond organ in probably 1990. Yeah, so it's been with me ever since, and I've done the terrible thing of chopping it in half to gig with it. So it went in and out of the back of the Escort estate dozens of times and hence got into this terrible condition, but it was pristine when I got it.

Geoff 1:46

And you got the pedals as well. Do you play with your feet as well?

Pete 1:48

I I play what I call ballad pedals. So if it's a nice slow tempo, I have a go. The way most jazz organists play is left-hand bass with some support from the left foot. It's not like classical organ bass where you're playing heel and toe all the time. I mean, some jazz organists do that, but most don't.

Geoff 2:07

I saw Larry Goldings, he was doing the same, right? So when you say support, what does what does that mean? Is that a good thing?

Pete 2:12

Right, okay, so say you're playing a bass line. That's my left that's my left hand. By tapping in time with the front of each note with your foot. It adds a little bit of a click to it. Right. Because the actual sound of the bass pedals is is quite a farty sound. So if you're playing.

Geoff 2:36

That's bloody loads of noise from your feet as well, isn't it?

Pete 2:38

It certainly does. You don't usually hear that. So I haven't got my dancing shoes on.

Geoff 2:41

Oh, okay. And having that click to the front of note really helps the percussiveness of the left hand, does it?

Pete 2:46

Yes, and if you listen to a lot of Jimmy Smith records and Richard Groove Holmes, those guys, I mean Groove Holmes could really play foot pedals as well, but um, for a lot of the time he would he'd be playing on an organ that was probably suboptimal. But if you listen to the bass lines, you will hear that little punch, and that is from the bass pedals. The other time you use bass pedals is for ballads. I mean that tone of the skills. As a bass player, you'll appreciate that when you hear organ bass, it's completely the opposite of acoustic bass or to a certain extent electric bass. Because the the front of the note is less complex.

Geoff 3:28

Less less attack?

Pete 3:28

Yes, no attack.

Geoff 3:29

Yeah, no attack, which is why you use the base of the pedals, yeah. I wonder if you do it in terms of Leslie, because you don't obviously don't have a Leslie in here.

Pete 3:36

There's no Leslie in here, so I'm using it's called a neo-ventilator pedal, which works with guitar as well, but it's a digital recreation, rather like the the one in Logic or in mode.

Geoff 3:46

And can you show us what that sounds like?

Pete 3:48

Yeah, so it's on stop at the moment. I've got a control where you'd expect to have on the organ the half -moon switch. So that's it in stop. That's it in fast. So if you imagine the Leslie cabinet is spinning, yeah. Spinning the top rotor goes one way and the base rotor goes the other. Then that's slow. If I turn the vibrato on the organ off, it's even more sort of obvious. So that's slow. Fast. And then stopped eventually.

Geoff 4:28

It's amazingly expressive, isn't it?

Pete 4:30

Yeah, it's one of those wondrous things. He he sort of invented the organ and got it right straight away, you know, Lawrence Hammond, that would be, back in the 30s, rather like Leo Fender did with the Telecaster. It's sort of you know

Geoff 4:41

It's a classic piece of kit, isn't it? I s I spent twelve years standing next to Georgie Fame. I remember years of fighting with the sound of two Leslie's at Ronnie Scott's.

Pete 4:49

Yeah, you didn't have them quiet.

Geoff 4:50

No, no. So let's chat about how you got into jazz

How Jazz First Grabbed Him

Geoff 4:54

in the first place.

Pete 4:54

When I was at school, I learned classical music, you know, choirs and the recorder and it like everyone does. And I had violin lessons and I bought a guitar and learned a few chords, and I had private piano lessons because they, you know, you can get those at school. But I always loved when when the teachers inverted commas 'messed around', you know, like the end of term concert. I remember one of the sports teachers could play a bit of piano, and one of the other teachers played a bit of drums, and another one was a bass player, and they weren't playing jazz as such, but it was that combination, it was a piano trio combination. And I just the first time I heard that, even though they weren't really playing jazz, they were accompanying the choir for something. Yeah, what a fantastic sound. I looked around at everyone else, and you know, they they didn't seem too impressed. But to me, that sound was amazing. Of course, I being a teenager, I didn't do anything about it. And eventually got to 16, and by then I was playing guitar in in school rock bands and

Geoff 5:45

So guitar was your first instrument?

Pete 5:48

I wouldn't go that far, no, no, because I by the at the same time I was playing piano, so I was I was more of a serious, I was taking my grades on piano. Um so I was more of a serious piano player, but I like playing the guitar and I like playing loud music.

Geoff 6:01

So you were an early um multi-instrumentalist by the sound of it?

Pete 6:04

I guess so, yeah. Yeah, and I love I had a pretty good ear, so I could pick harmony out and

Geoff 6:09

Where did you grow up?

Pete 6:10

Wolverhampton. There was a very good local authority school's music service, you know, and we we used to have youth orchestras because I played a bit of violin. I was shunted gradually up to the town youth orchestra, and that was great fun as well. Sitting in the middle of an orchestral sound is amazing. Yeah, it's the the sonic thing that captured me, my imagination.

Geoff 6:30

So, when did you first find the organ?

Pete 6:32

Fast forward to when we were at university, I went to UEA, studied classical music. Um, that's where I met Kate Williams, my missus, and Julian Siegel was the in Kate's year as well. It was a tiny little music department, and they didn't teach jazz there, but it was a quite a forward-looking department in as much as they had a studio and electro-acoustic music was one of their specialities. So I learnt a bit about studios and recording and making music with tape machines and computers and early digital synths. I have absolutely no regrets of going on that course. So that was good. But we were at the same time, we were going to these little pub gigs, and Julian Siegel started joining in with some of the local guys. It was a great scene in the way that there were probably at least two decent instrumentalists per instrument in towns.

Geoff 7:19

And that's where you discovered the organ.

Pete 7:21

And then sooner or later, yes, uh, you know, buying second-hand records and things, bought a Jimmy Smith record, and I thought, wow, that's that's what I want to do. That that is got that ticks all the boxes, you know. It's this sort of bluesy gospelly soul and jazz, you know, it's it's it's um great starting point. So then of course you go down the rabbit hole of trying to buy one, fix one, yeah, maintain one, and uh lug one about the place, which uh is good for everything apart from your back. So I no longer touch Hammond. They don't actually, they're they're over-engineered in the way that things aren't these days, I guess. But they are fiendishly complicated. Underneath each key, you can imagine a pusher that makes and breaks nine contacts, and each wire that it contacts is like a human hair. It's barely, barely thicker than a human hair, and it's covered in an insulation wire. And eventually, on some organs, the foam that they used to keep the dust out starts to break down, turns into a caustic substance which then eats through the insulation wires. So on this organ and the one downstairs in Kate's room, I've been through, I've taken it to bits and cleaned all the rotting foam off. It's a it takes a week, you know.

Geoff 8:34

Wow.

Pete 8:34

It does take, it's the best part of a week to do. But I mean the the the actual amplifiers and the motor system you can hear whirring in the background, maybe. It's like it's like a gearbox with lots of spinning discs on it. As long as you keep it well oiled every few years, you know, they're they're so over-engineered, they don't usually fail. And you can get all the valves and things, that's not a problem. But it's just the the bulk of them, really. So luckily, these days we have modern digital versions which do really well.

Owning Hammonds and Learning Vocabulary

Geoff 9:03

So, how did you learn your um vocabulary? Did you did you go through stages of transcribing? What was your process?

Pete 9:09

I mean, despite my classical music education, my reading isn't my strongest point.

Geoff 9:14

Is that because you you haven't done it for years or something? Because presumably if you were doing grades you were good at it at one time.

Pete 9:19

I I wasn't good at sight reading. I mean, I think it might be to do with the fact that I've got relatively good ears for for music. That say I was reading a a piece of Bach, I would end up playing what I thought it said rather than what it actually said. Okay. So what I'd I'd end up playing something that was musically legal, but wasn't Bach. Right, okay. If you know what I mean. So I mean it would it'd be the detail. So that yeah, I'd be let down in the detail, and my piano my piano teacher, poor bloke, he you know, the the amount of times he pulled me up on all this. It's not a regret, but it's just the way it turned out. I was listening to a lot of heavy metal, so from the guitar. Heavy rock perspective. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, rock and you know, sort of A C D C Deep Purple.

Geoff 10:01

You probably get organ in some of that music.

Pete 10:02

Oh, yeah, definitely you do, but that was before that was way before uh I mean there's this we're talking when I was between the ages of twelve and fifteen. That was way before I I got one of these.

Geoff 10:12

So I asked you to pick a tune to play today.

'Secret Love' Performance and Left-Hand Bass

Geoff 10:15

Um, what did you what did you pick?

Pete 10:16

I thought Secret Love is the sort of thing that I'd sit down and start noodling at without realising it.

Geoff 10:22

Okay. Right, okay, so here comes Secret Love. You're gonna play two choruses with the last eight as your introduction. Here we go. Killing. Oh yes. Do you prefer to play left-hand bass? Do you do you ever get books to play Hammond with a bass player as well, or would you which what would you prefer?

Pete 12:46

Uh I guess it's because I've done it m more than anything else, is when I'm playing bass. Yeah. On you know, left-hand bass. But as I was attempting to explain probably badly, the the it's it completely changes the dynamic of what you do with your right hand if you're playing if there's a bass player on the gig. In a jazz context, it's less comfortable.

Geoff 13:06

Because obviously you can't comp yourself if you're playing the you've got two single lines.

Pete 13:11

Well you say, yeah, sort of. I mean, it's I I play in a a trio with George Dublin Art, Theman, and I quite like the format where there is no guitar or piano. It it means that I can comp myself where I think there's a gap that I'd like to leave. The way it works is that you play the the bass line on the lower manual and the melody solo, whatever, on the upper manual, but the lower manual sound is also the comping sounds.

Geoff 13:38

So, how would you do that then? Show me how you do that.

Pete 13:40

Right, okay, so so in the introduction that we've just done, I played some chords on the lower manual along with the bass line. So that's the it's the same sound, it's all on the same keyboard. When it came to playing the solo, I went up to the top keyboard, which has this nice percussion front to the note. Yeah. Yeah. There's a slightly fuller sound.

Drawbars Harmonics and Jimmy Smith Tone

Geoff 14:03

So while we're at it, I'm really interested in this. Just tell me what these pull covers do. And bearing in mind, people can't see them.

Pete 14:09

No, right, so you've got for each keyboard, there are nine different drawbars. On a church organ, you have footages. They're called footages. And an eight-foot pipe is known as that's what you call the actual standard pitch that you're playing. So it's the closest to a sine tone that a Hammond can do. Okay. It's just one frequency. Right, okay. So for that's holding a G in the middle of the keyboard. So if you play 440, that would be an A. That's A-440. So the rest of the drawbars, there is a subharmonic, which is an octave below. Yeah. There's one that sounds a fifth above. A fifth above. And the basically the the white drawbars, of which there are four, are all multiples of that fundamental. The black ones, apart from the sub harmonic, are all odd harmonics.

Geoff 15:09

It's funny because you don't notice those fifths because they're so fundamental to the to the note.

Pete 15:14

On a piano or a violin or a guitar, you're still getting all those harmonics, but you're getting them in variable amounts over time. Whereas with the organ, you're hearing them all at once until you take your finger off the key. So you're actually, if you listen, it sounds like a major chord. That's just one note. You got a fifth, you got a third. It's more obvious if I if I just pull out those three drawbars. That's just one note.

Geoff 15:46

Wow, wow. So how did you use that on when we when you just played through? Were there any aspects that you were changing it as you were going?

Pete 15:53

No, not on that one. I I stuck quite rigidly to the Jimmy Smith jazz sound, which is the first three drawbars. So you've got the fundamental, that sort of fifth above, and you've got the the sub. And in addition to that, I put the percussion, which is a is like a it's imagine a xylophone note on the beginning of each. You know, if I play it in isolation.

Geoff 16:18

Lovely little percussiveness to it, ping to it.

Pete 16:20

And that I've got that percussion set to the third harmonic, which is a fifth above the the actual fundamental note that you're hearing. You can have second harmonic, which brings it down to the same note. But I quite like that fifth above.

Geoff 16:44

Yeah, that's the traditional Jimmy Smith sound, isn't it?

Pete 16:47

And it's it's further enhanced by having the vibrato chorus effect, which is in the organ, not the Leslie, on a chorus setting as well. So it gives a nice sort of rich wobble to it, you know.

Geoff 17:02

And a silly question is, is it in stereo?

Pete 17:04

Nope, it's absolutely mono. Any stereo effect that you hear is coming from the Leslie from the Leslie, which yeah, in this instance is a Leslie gorgeous creation.

Geoff 17:12

What a great instrument. Thanks for that.

Pete 17:14

It's kept me busy for a few years.

Geoff 17:16

Amazing.

Favourite Records and Organ Heroes

Geoff 17:24

Right. I think it's time for some questions.

Pete 17:27

Go on then!

Geoff 17:29

Right. If you listen to the podcast, you probably know what these questions are going to be, aren't you?

Pete 17:33

I've got a fair idea.

Geoff 17:34

Uh so question one is do you have a favourite album?

Pete 17:38

No, is the question is the answer. There are too many. It depends on what day you ask me. But I mean, okay, just for the sake of plucking one out of the uh Larry Young's Unity album, take some beating.

Geoff 17:49

That's the one with the big, big black lettering on the front, isn't it?

Pete 17:53

Yes. Um it's Joe Henderson and

Geoff 17:55

Larry Young.

Pete 17:56

Larry Young and

Geoff 17:57

Elvin Jones? Is it Elvin Jones?

Pete 18:00

Yes, it is. Okay. And and uh Woody Shaw.

Geoff 18:03

Um and is is that an album that had a profound effect on you when you were kind of learning the organ?

Pete 18:08

When when I first heard it, I didn't know what was going on. Because it's modal, and at the time I was still on book one of

Geoff 18:14

Did you say modal? They're playing tunes on one chord.

Pete 18:16

The way Larry Young structured his chords was he'd stack fourths. So instead going back to Secret Love, if he was playing that tune, he would treat all those.

Geoff 18:31

Right. That gives a very open sound to it, doesn't it? Yeah. That's how he plays, yeah.

Pete 18:36

Yeah, at the time I hadn't listened to an awful lot of that stuff, and I thought, wow, now that's it's so obviously different to the way Jimmy Smith played.

Geoff 18:42

What is the Jimmy Smith way of playing?

Pete 18:44

It's it's I guess it's sort of more uh traditional 13ths. He played loads of blueses. You know, you can you can hear lots of Jimmy Smith's record that he he doesn't just play blueses and ballads, but he he got very successful at doing that, obviously with a phenomenal technique. But then it's the interesting thing about jazz organ is that it, you know, though all these elements fuse together, and you get someone like Joey De Francesco who absorbed the whole thing, the the Jimmy Smith side, the Larry Young side, and he combine it all within his playing.

Geoff 19:21

I remember seeing Joey De Francesco at Ronnie's a few times. He was just a master or something. Some of the tempos he played, and then he would play trumpet at the same time.

Pete 19:30

Yeah, yeah. And he could play tenor sax as well, and he sang. Yeah.

Geoff 19:34

My God. Right. Question number two is there a musician alive or dead that you'd like to play with?

Pete 19:39

Now, this is this is impossible to say no, because I'd I'd probably get totally starstruck, which is another of your questions, and fall to bits. I mean, I'm I'm I'm gonna take this a different way. Sometimes you start playing with with someone and you think, yeah, this is clicking. Really enjoy playing with this person, and that is the sort of musician you want to play with. Yeah. There are other times when it the opposite happens and you you can't really see why. And I'd like to play with the former.

Geoff 20:04

But are there musicians that you've admired, you know, rhythm section players or bass players or or drummers or something like that?

Pete 20:10

Well, yeah, I mean Elvin Jones, that would be someone that I can't imagine I wouldn't enjoy, you know, at least having a go.

Geoff 20:15

Yeah, I know what you mean though, is sometimes it's not what you imagine, is it? When you actually get to play with someone.

Pete 20:20

No.

Geoff 20:20

So, question three, what would you say was the highlight of your career? I think I'm looking forward to that. That's one I'm still to come.

Pete 20:26

Yeah, I I I've had some wonderful gigs. I don't think things like that stick in my brain particularly. There's nothing better than finishing a gig and thinking, yeah, I think I acquitted myself as well as I could have done, and they all played their asses off, and we can all go home feeling relatively satisfied with our and and that's all I want to aim for. I'm quite happy with that when that happens.

Geoff 20:46

Okay, good answer. You we've probably already talked about this, but what's about your musical weakness?

Pete 20:51

The reading's not great. I think I get nervous and that affects my time.

Nerves, Starstruck and Confidence

Geoff 20:56

So that would be the next question. Do you ever get nervous on stage? Yes. Yeah, that would do, wouldn't it?

Pete 21:01

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's it's it's like the as soon as you get nervous, all of the you you know, you start overplaying, time gets wobbly. I'm talking about myself here. And if there's any reading to be done, that gets worse as well.

Geoff 21:12

But what's the reason for getting nervous in the first place?

Pete 21:14

I I understand that under preparation is a big one, but there is always sort of some devil tapping on your shoulder.

Geoff 21:21

Really?

Pete 21:21

Yeah, sort of, yeah, it's terrible, isn't it? But uh there is an element of that. But having said that, you know, sometimes we do a little tour here and there. It takes a while to to bed into tunes, to bed into bands. And I guess the first few times I play with Art and George, I was probably a little bit nervous generally. These days I'm not, you know, I can I can sit on the stage with those two, and if it goes wrong, it's like I'm not I'm not gonna beat myself up too much about it.

Geoff 21:47

So talk about being starstruck. We we spoke about that as earlier as well, didn't we? Have you ever been starstruck?

Pete 21:53

I mean, probably. I mean, I played with John Etheridge a bit and I've been aware of all the many things that he'd done and without really knowing him. Time I played with F, I was probably a bit starstruck, and probably the first well, first definitely the first time I played with Art. This is years and years and years ago. Do you know Jill Alexander? Does that name ring any bells? She's a bass player, lives in Suffolk, and she's a bass player and artist and wonderful person. She used to put on gigs in her, she lives in a barn conversion in the middle of Suffolk. And she used to invite jazz stars up there and put on a proper concert in an evening so she'd have Peter King or Art Theman and people like that. And I was nowhere. But she she still booked me to play piano with these guys, and it was like, oh no. So yeah, I'd be totally starstruck and uh make a complete hash of it.

Geoff 22:38

What a great way to. I mean, you must have learned tons by doing that?

Pete 22:40

Yeah, of course you do. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is this is the you know, because I didn't I didn't study jazz at any of the colleges, which is seems to be you know, it's the opposite way that most people go these days, isn't it? So the yeah, it was on gigs. It was it was it was quite an intense way of learning what it was all about, is you know, yeah, being thrown in the deep end and

Geoff 22:57

Yeah, sure.

Sandwiches, Films, Travel and Crosswords

Pete 22:59

What's your favourite sandwich? There are there are various answers to this, but uh the the one I'm gonna go for is I quite like on a Saturday to wander down Portobello Road and buy my coffee and uh near the coffee shop where I buy my coffee, there's a Palestinian uh falafel stand, and they do the absolute best falafel sandwiches.

Geoff 23:19

On what kind of bread or or um?

Pete 23:20

It's it's a they do it as a wrap, but it's got they call it the the the one I go for is the full shebang. You get several falafels which are cooked in front of you, obviously. Their own homemade hummus, yeah, salad, pickles, you know, the Middle Eastern pickles, which I absolutely love, tahina sauce, in addition to the to the hummus. It's just like oh sets me up for the afternoon.

Geoff 23:41

I'm gonna go go up there and try one of those. Uh all right, moving on from music. What about have you got a favourite movie?

Pete 23:47

Uh again, this is something that you ask me on a different day and I'll say a different film. But I mean I keep coming back to With nail and I.

Geoff 23:55

I can't recall that one to be honest.

Pete 23:56

You've got a treat in store.

Geoff 23:58

I probably have seen it, but uh but I can't remember. What's the premise? What's the story?

Pete 24:02

Right, it's it's based in Camden in the the late 60s, around the turn of the 1970. And it's it's a story of two struggling actors, Richard E. Grant, who's from a from quite a middle class family, um, quite a well-to-do background as as is unfold in the film. And um a northern import into London actor who's uh probably more talented. It's basically the story of these two who live in a hovel squat and their various adventures with alcohol and drugs. But it's um it's it's quite a um it's quite a roller coaster.

Geoff 24:42

Great. Do you watch many movies? You watch uh

Pete 24:45

We don't watch we don't seem to watch a lot of movies. We've we watch quite a lot of tele um box sets. So we've we missed for some reason we completely missed out on Better Call Saul, which we've just finished, and that was amazing. We love that. We can't can't get enough of that. So now we're going back through all the DVDs, watching the extra bits, yeah, which we'll never do. We we'll never ever do. Nice. We can't get enough of that.

Geoff 25:08

Very nice too. Um so is there a favourite venue you like to play in? A venue specific to organ. That's that would be my question. Acoustics with organ, do you need a bigger space or a smaller space?

Pete 25:20

I I quite like playing at Ronnie's actually, because

Geoff 25:23

Nice and dry.

Pete 25:24

Yes, it's lovely and dry. And if you're playing a real Hammond with a real Leslie, more often than not, there are problems

Geoff 25:29

because it's throwing out loads of low end, I suppose, isn't it?

Pete 25:32

Yeah, there's a lot of low end, and sometimes you can't have the Leslie next to you, and sometimes you have to, monitors and things. I found in Ronnie's um that you can you can put the Leslie sort of 10 feet away. You can still hear it pretty well, and the yeah, with the monitoring's good there.

Geoff 25:48

Georgie Fame used to have one each side of the spot.

Pete 25:50

I know I played, I played Georgie's. I was I was playing with Nigel Price. Um we were supporting Georgie Fame a while back. Georgie very kindly let me play, yeah, use his it was it was too loud for me. I mean, I didn't dare turn it down.

Geoff 26:03

So, what about travelling? Do you do you travel much? Have you got a favourite city?

Pete 26:07

I like London. You know, I can't imagine living anywhere else. It's nice to visit a lot of places once you get there, but I'm not a great traveller. I'm more than happy with London. It's like the other day I had a gig um near Brick Lane, and I'd never been to Brick Lane on a Sunday before. And it was like, why do we bother going to you know Amsterdam or Brussels for you know you've got that you've got that vibe. And uh I can get there on the tube.

Geoff 26:31

Yeah, when you say you're not a great traveller, you don't like flying or something like that.

Pete 26:33

I don't like flying, so the the old aisle seat um doesn't matter which to me, uh I'd probably choose the aisle just for

Geoff 26:42

You don't like to look out the window? Because I'm not a great flyer either, but I I like to look out the window.

Pete 26:46

I don't like the sort of like the embarrassment of having to climb over people to go to the loo. I mean I get to that stage in my life now.

Geoff 26:52

Yes, I know. We're getting there. All right, a couple last questions. Cats or dogs?

Pete 26:56

Dogs, definitely, although I'm allergic to what to both father-in-law and stepmother-in-law. They've got a pair of lurchers, cross with Saluki, yeah, they're different. Greyhoundy type looking dogs, aren't they? But they're lovely, and I'm not so allergic to them because they don't have an undercoat, which means they don't have the dander, which is what you're really allergic to.

Geoff 27:15

Right, okay.

Pete 27:16

Yeah, you've got a dog, haven't you? I've got two dogs, yeah.

Geoff 27:18

Yeah. Uh what's your most used app on your phone?

Pete 27:22

Guardian crossword. Okay. I mean the Guardian generally, I guess, but the crossword in particular.

Geoff 27:26

Uh that's a subscription to is it?

Pete 27:28

I yeah, I don't pay much. It's it's a I'm not gonna give them an advert, but it's uh it's only a couple of quid a month or something. And that lets me uh use the crossword, which if I've got five minutes at a gig or I'm gonna

Geoff 27:40

really good. You do cryptic or regular?

Pete 27:42

No, the cryptic ones. Yeah, but it's it's a long, slow journey getting any good at them. I guess I am better at them now than I used to be.

Geoff 27:49

Georgie Fame was always a crypto Telegraph guy.

Pete 27:52

Oh right, yeah.

Geoff 27:53

He was the he would always carry one of those. The Telegraph folded into into four or something.

Pete 27:58

Yeah, so you just got the crossword.

Geoff 27:59

Did you see the crossword?

Pete 28:00

Yeah, it's it's great on the phone because you if you really get stumped, you can you can cheat.

Geoff 28:05

It's an art, isn't it, to doing cryptic crossword parts.

Pete 28:07

Well, it's yeah, it's conveni I don't I don't know an art, but it's it's conventions and the the skillful crossword setter can still obey the conventions and and mislead you, misdirect you, and uh that's half the fun, I guess.

Favourite Chord Voicings and Wrap-Up

Pete 28:20

So yeah.

Geoff 28:20

Fabulous of that. And my final question, what's your favourite chord?

Pete 28:25

Hmm. Well, again, this is a ask me on Tuesday and I'll say something different.

Geoff 28:28

But uh are there things that are specific to the organ that sound good in terms of range, in terms of number of notes?

Pete 28:35

Yes, I mean the voicings on it on the organ, you can't just play left-hand piano voicings. No. Um, because they just sound like mud.

Geoff 28:42

Muddy.

Pete 28:43

Um. But those fourth-spaced voicings, rather like on the guitar, I guess. Yeah. Um they're good, but I mean, as if you want something a little bit more um fuller sounding, then that would be.

Geoff 29:04

Would this be one of your favourite chords?

Pete 29:06

That could be one of my favourites.

Geoff 29:07

Tell us what the notes are and that.

Pete 29:09

Right, so it's a C seven, sharp nine, flat nine, uh sharp eleven, and then another seventh on the top. So you're doubling the seventh. That's the only doubled note. If you pull a few drawbars out and put the Leslie on, or that's another good one, did you want to kick off something? And that's just like a that that is a um 13 flat nine, isn't it?

Geoff 29:50

But the wobble that Leslie gives is is quite profound, isn't it?

Pete 29:54

Yeah, yeah. I mean there are other effects you can have. There's one called squabble which uses the Leslie on fact, and that's where you use a tremolo. Octaves. Actually, will work on Secret Love. Right. Yeah, stuff like that. Yeah. For chords generally, the guitar probably has the best portion of really nice chords, you know.

Geoff 30:24

Simply because it's tuned in fourths and you're you've only got to put your finger straight away across it, you've got a nice chord, isn't it?

Pete 30:29

Absolutely.

Geoff 30:30

Yeah, yeah. Wow, well, thank you very much. I think that will do it. Last thing I was thinking of from Norwich, it's the Quiz of the Week. Remember that? Did you play that on the organ? How did it go? What was the Quiz of the Week? Sale of the Century, wasn't it? With the organ. Yeah. Yeah.

Pete 30:52

Yeah, and then that's it. And then it would have to end on a nice

Geoff 30:58

Well Pete, thank you very much. That was great. I learned a lot today. Yeah. See you next time. Hopefully, we do a gig together soon. Alright, I'll see you soon.

Announcement 31:08

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