Just make sure you have your wraparound Ray-Bans handy. Needless to say, collectors love them and are willing to pay top prices for them, meaning that one in good nick will set you back many times its original price.įortunately, we can recreate the Vox sound quite easily, thanks to a number of excellent virtual emulations and soundware for popular samplers. However, thanks to their obsoleted germanium transistors, they can be a chore to maintain. Quite a few of them were made and, if you're lucky, you can still get one that works. Again, rumours of its demise were unfounded, and it would reappear 35 years on, thanks to bands like Arctic Monkeys and The Horrors. Recognizable for its reverse-color keyboard and red hood, the Continental employed six drawbars controlling the voicing (reed or flute) and octave range for a streamlined answer. Yet when the smoke cleared and all of that rebellion had been co-opted by the mainstream music machine, the Vox was nowhere to be seen. As distinctive in look and sound today as when it was introduced in 1962, the Vox Continental Organ is a combo classic. It perfectly suited the rowdy recordings of bands like Elvis Costello's Attractions and the hyper-kinetic Ska stylings of Madness and The Specials. I have one of the 73 key models and its a great little board. Not very relevant to those of you who arent stateside but I must admit the Vox Continental at a price point of 999 is definitely worth drawing some attention to. Perhaps because it had become unfashionable, the Continental and its offspring (Jaguar, Corinthian) became the go-to organs for Punk and New Wave musicians. I was going through and checking the specifications on some different boards and I noticed this: Vox Continental. Then, more than half a decade later, something strange happened: the Vox came back. The high-quality sound engine section is. The Vox Continental fell out of fashion as the 1960s came to a close - it just didn't fit in with the burgeoning heavy rock scene. The VOX Continental uses a simple and intuitive interface that allows quick accessibility of every function. It fuelled The Animals' House of the Rising Sun as well as Question Mark and the Mysterians' 96 Tears, before becoming the sound of The Doors' Light My Fire and, perhaps most (in)famously, Iron Butterfly's indulgent epic In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. Rather than replacing the mighty Hammond, the Continental carved out its own niche, finding favour with plenty of legendary acts and gracing many a classic cut. That thinner, more focused sound could cut through a raucous rock 'n' roll clatter without taking over the mix. The Vox simply wasn't capable of the stage-shaking rumble produced by a B3's spinning metal tonewheels.Īnd yet this proved to be one of its strengths. In front of a crowd of 55 600, Lennon closed. The actual organ used at Shea Stadium in 1965. Wheezy, weedy, nasal at times, it was produced by transistor-based circuits. The Vox Continental Portable Organ used by John Lennon at the historic August 15, 1965, Shea Stadium concert, as well as the Beatles’ Augappearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and on the studio recording of I’m Down didn’t last long. Released in 1962 and designed as a more portable organ than Hammond's B3, Vox's Continental was everything the Hammond was not.Īlas, the sound of the Vox was equally anaemic compared to that of a Hammond.
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