Nothing sounds like a Hammond B3. Many companies tried unsuccessfully to compete with Hammond (Yamaha* and Farfisa come to mind) but they never could come close.

And at the heart of the Hammond sound was the Leslie speaker. Again, many tried to reproduce it, but failed miserably. Rather than going into a complex and stupidly written explanation on how it works, here is a video that will actually help you.

Once when I had my studio, a client came in with a sampler keyboard and one of the sampled sound was a somewhat decent Hammond copy. After laying down a track with it, he asked my opinion and rather than shut ,my mouth and nod, I told him that being a sampler rather than the real thing, it missed the Leslie sound to make it like the original.

Oh yes, that was a dumb mistake. The guy then insisted in us duplicating the Leslie sound for his song, probably more for bragging rights than actual musical enterprise. Although we had some rack effects gear that allegedly could make something sound like played through a Leslie, it sucked.  But there was an old way we knew from reading some ancient secret books (no interwebs back then. You kept an extensive library of audio books and mags or dies) on how to reproduce an accurate Leslie sound: You stood an assistant in front of a speaker while holding a microphone by the cable about a foot or two down and the same from the speaker. And then you had the assistant spin the mike like you were playing with a lasso.

Did it looks stupid? Yes., Did it work? Yes  too, but only after a lot of trial and error and basically the client getting tired and saying “Yes, this is the take.” Hell, what did we care? Studios and engineers charge by the hour anyway. You want to experiment? it is your wallet.

And as an extra Sunday Music, I leave you with two classics using of the Hammond B3.

Hat tip Bill M

• Yamaha never got the organ sound right, but they did come up with an electric piano that eventually won over the Fender. But that was in part the fault of Fender when they no longer produced the Fender-Rhodes line and went on their own design that was never as good as the F-R.