Hammond Mailing Lists (etc.)

There's a great number of Hammond web sites out there with lots of useful information. At times, it seems like there's an equal number of other Hammond venues. These include several mailing lists, a newsgroup, an IRC (Internet relay chat) channel or two, an IM (instant messaging) channel or two, and who knows what else.

Discussing Hammonds could easily be a full time job. Many skilled players and knowledgable technicians hang out on one or more of these lists. And, amazingly, they even let people like me participate.

Here's the list of Hammond chatter lists as I know it.

• "Hammond Technical" (a.k.a. "Hamtech") mailing list and IRC channel home, a descendant of the original Hammond mailing list
• "Hammond Mailing List" (formerly the "Hamster" list) home, formed when some folks found Hamtech too restrictive
• alt.music.hammond-organ (the newsgroup), formerly associated with the Hamster list, then cast adrift in a flurry of netstalking, shows some signs of gentrification recently
• Hammond Zone, a Yahoo group (really a mailing list, not a newgroup), probably the largest group in terms of membership (over 900 members), seems fairly level-headed as Hammond groups go
• CloneWheel Support Group, another Yahoo group, discussing things that try to emulate the classic Hammond sound (including more recent products from Hammond-Suzuki), probably has more working musicians than any other group.
• Tonewheel Forum, a new web-based discussion board with lots of model-specific forums.
• Electronic Organ List (EORG-L), which mainly discusses organs that try to sound like real organs, but the topic of Hammonds does come up from time to time, includes a handful of pipe lovers who equate Hammond with Heresy
• Mechanical Music Digest, a list devoted primarily to "self playing" instruments such as player pianos, which includes the reknown Aeolian Hammond player organ
• If you look at Yahoo Groups, you'll find a great profusion of organ-related groups, including a couple of dozen groups related to Hammonds and Hammond clones, such as:
  • Hammond World (not very active)
  • Hammond Freak (not very active)
  • Hammond Spinet (not very active)
  • Nord Electro, fairly active discussion of the Nord Electro, which emulates a B-3 and other classic keyboards.
  • EMU B3, discussion of another Hammond emulator, not very active
  • and many more, including Hammond-related groups in several languages other than English
• Custom Hammond mIRC client from hammondb3organ.com
• Hammond web board from hammondb3organ.com (not very active)
• Vintage Hammond list

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