Soundcheck Diaries

I love mixing real musicians making real music in real time. There’s something special about instruments that don’t just produce sound—they move air. Wood vibrates. Strings resonate. Tubes glow. Rotating speakers spin. They rely on mechanics and physics to create something alive, unpredictable, and deeply human.

So you can imagine my excitement when I walked into Campus JAX and saw a beautifully restored vintage Hammond B3 organ paired with its iconic Leslie speaker sitting center stage. I wasn’t just mixing another jazz trio that night. I was about to mix one of today’s most respected Hammond organists, Brian Charette, performing on one of the most legendary instruments ever built.

Brian Charette has established himself as one of the leading voices in modern jazz organ. A Grammy-nominated Hammond artist, composer, educator, and author, he’s consistently ranked among the world’s top organists in the DownBeat Critics Poll and earned the magazine’s prestigious “Rising Star: Organ” award. His career has included performances and recordings with artists such as Joni Mitchell, Chaka Khan, Paul Simon, Cyndi Lauper, John Patitucci, and Vinnie Colaiuta, while his own recordings continue to push the Hammond B3 into new musical territory. Beyond performing, Charette teaches masterclasses around the world and literally wrote the book on the instrument—101 Hammond B3 Tips.

The Instrument That Refuses to Stand Still

One of the reasons the Hammond B3 sounds so alive is because it actually is moving.

Unlike a keyboard that relies on digital samples, the Hammond B3 creates sound mechanically. Inside the organ are 91 spinning tonewheels—small metal discs that rotate past electromagnetic pickups to generate pure sine waves. By combining those tonewheels with the famous drawbars, the player literally builds the sound in real time. It’s an ingenious piece of engineering from the 1930s that is still revered today.

But that’s only half the story.

The Hammond was never meant to be heard through a conventional speaker. It was designed to be paired with a Leslie speaker, and that’s where the magic happens.

Inside a Leslie are two rotating elements: a high-frequency horn and a rotating drum (called a rotor) for the low frequencies. As they spin, they don’t just make the sound louder—they physically throw it around the room. The listener hears a constantly changing blend of volume, direction, and pitch caused by the Doppler effect, the same phenomenon that makes a passing ambulance siren seem to change pitch as it drives by.

Instead of sound coming from one fixed point, it’s constantly moving through the space. The result is a rich, swirling sound that breathes in a way few instruments can. Watch as Brian Charette teaches us how this instrument works.

As a front-of-house engineer, that presents a unique challenge. You’re not simply placing microphones on a speaker cabinet. You’re trying to capture motion. Every rotation changes what the microphones hear, and every change in microphone placement subtly changes the character of the instrument.

It’s one of the few instruments where the speaker itself is as much a part of the performance as the musician playing it.

Capturing a Moving Target

So how do you microphone an instrument whose sound is constantly moving?

For this gig, I kept it simple and effective. I placed two Shure SM57s on opposite sides of the Leslie’s upper section to capture the rotating high-frequency horn. For the low-frequency rotor, I positioned an Telefunkin M82 kick drum microphone at the bottom of the cabinet. This gave me independent control of both the shimmering highs and the powerful lows that make a Leslie so distinctive.

One of the beautiful things about a Leslie is that it does much of the work for you. Because it’s physically projecting sound in every direction, the audience naturally hears that swirling motion throughout the room. I didn’t need to reinforce it very much through the house PA. The Leslie itself was already filling the room exactly as it was designed to do.

The broadcast mix, however, was a different story.

For the live stream, I hard-panned the two SM57s left and right. That immediately opened up the stereo image, making the organ sound wider, fuller, and much more immersive for viewers listening with headphones or stereo speakers. It helped recreate some of the movement that naturally exists in the room.

Even then, no recording can truly capture what it’s like to stand in front of a real Leslie speaker.

That’s because a Leslie isn’t just creating left and right information—it’s creating a three-dimensional sound field. The rotating horn and bass rotor continuously change their direction toward and away from you. The reflections bouncing off the walls arrive at your ears from constantly changing angles, while the Doppler effect causes subtle shifts in pitch and intensity. Your brain combines all of those tiny changes into an experience that feels almost alive. A pair of microphones—or even an immersive surround recording—can only capture a small slice of that experience. You can hear a Leslie on a recording, but you don’t feel a Leslie until you’re standing in the same room with it.

The low-frequency rotor played an especially important role in this performance. I brought the bottom microphone up significantly in the mix and fed it into my subwoofer bus to give the organ the weight it deserved.

In this trio, there wasn’t a bass player.

Brian was pulling double duty, playing the traditional upper-register organ parts with one hand while covering the bass lines with the other. The Leslie wasn’t just adding character—it was reproducing the entire low-end foundation of the band. Making sure those bass notes translated clearly through the PA was essential to giving the audience a full, balanced mix.

Below is a clip from my broadcast featuring an incredible solo by Brian Charette. If you’ve never experienced a Hammond B3 and Leslie in action, this will give you a taste of why these instruments have remained legendary for generations. Of course, if you ever get the chance to hear one live, don’t pass it up. It’s an experience no recording can fully reproduce.

Some Instruments Are Meant to Be Experienced

Every now and then, I get to mix an instrument that reminds me why I fell in love with live sound in the first place. The Hammond B3 and Leslie aren’t just pieces of vintage gear—they’re living, breathing instruments that interact with the room, the audience, and the musician in a way that modern technology still struggles to duplicate. Mixing Brian Charette wasn’t about making the organ louder; it was about preserving the character and emotion that the instrument naturally produces. It’s nights like these that remind me that great live sound isn’t about changing what the audience hears—it’s about faithfully delivering an experience they’ll remember long after the last note fades away. And when that last Leslie chord slowly swirled into silence, I found myself thinking the same thing every audio engineer hopes for: I can’t wait to mix one again.