Why we almost didn’t organize the organs by tone divider tech

One thing we’ve been thinking a lot about is how to classify the documents so that they’re easy to browse. We want the archive to be usable by everyone, including people who are unfamiliar with the minutia of Wurlitzer organ models. One way to do that is to group documents by subject, so people can seek out the information that interests them. The most common subject in the archive is the electronic organ, so grouping all of the organ documents together would create a massive subset of the archive. Clearly, we have to split the Organ category into a few subcategories. Or do we?

Option 1: Classify by tone generator

One very obvious way to subcategorize the organs is to split them up by their tone generator technology. When comparing two organ models, many people naturally bring up tone generators. And many people who play vintage organs have a preference for one tone generator over another.

Option 2: An organ is an organ

On the other hand, categorizing organs by their tone generator obscures the reason why Wurlitzer made electronic organs in the first place. It implies that making an organ was an exercise in synthesis: how can we make these electronic oscillators sound cool and musical? But that calculation didn’t come until much later, and it’s really an analysis that users make, not designers. For designers of commercial instruments, “cost-effective and marketable” is more of a priority than “cool and musical.”

Electronic organs were originally modeled after pipe organs. Pipe organs are too big for regular people to play at home. Shrinking a pipe organ into a pump organ makes it possible to play organs at home, but pump organs don’t have the same power and volume. However, if you can turn the sound into an electronic signal, it can be amplified until it’s as powerful as the original pipe organ.

So, in a sense, Wurlitzer did not consider itself a manufacturer of “vacuum tube organs” or “transistor divider organs.” It just made organs. So, categorizing organs by tone divider technology creates a distinction that perhaps did not originally exist in the archive.

Option 3: Why not both?

Ultimately, we decided to categorize the organs by their tone generator technology. But we hope that users of the archive will remember that, from one perspective, an organ is just an organ.

Tone generator is a useful subcategory. If you are unfamiliar with an organ, knowing what type of tone generator it has can tell you a few things about it. First of all, it can generally tell you the age of the instrument. Wurlitzer adopted new technology fairly quickly, in hopes of reducing manufacturing costs. Then, after a year or two, Wurlitzer would phase out the old technology. So, in general, reed organs were earlier than vacuum tube organs, which were earlier than discrete transistor organs, which were earlier than analog integrated circuit organs, which were earlier than digital organs.

The earlier technology generally took up more space than later technology. Vacuum tubes take up a lot of space, and they run very hot, which limits the density of the surrounding circuit. Transistors occupied a lot less space, and integrated circuits could contain thousands of individual transistors encapsulated in a tiny plastic box. So, in vacuum tube organs, a lot of the interior cabinet was occupied by sprawling circuits that didn’t do anything other the basic organ functions of generating the signal and then amplifying it. Once the footprint of the tone generators and amplifiers was reduced—first by discrete transistor designs, then by ICs—the organ gained a lot of extra space that could be occupied by additional voices and effects. That’s why you’ll find features like Banjo in the IC organs and not the vacuum tube organs. We think of tube instruments as simple and stripped down, but that was for reasons of cost, and not a lack of desire to make synthesized sounds.

The additional voices and features in an IC divider organ are a consequence of the physical layout of the circuit, not the electronics of the tone generator. Electronically, the IC divider itself isn't that different from a discrete transistor circuit. Instead of individual oscillator components on a printed circuit board, the IC packs everything inside a single component. It's doing the same job in a smaller footprint.

So, classification by technology shouldn't be understood to imply that the tone generator is responsible for all of the differences between the various generations of organs. There are a lot of factors that influence the sound and feel of an organ, and the tone generator is just one of them.

Furthermore, because Wurlitzer adopted each technology in succession, categorizing by tone generator can imply a teleological view of organ design. In other words, it might imply that earlier tone generator topologies are an imperfect or primitive version of the later technologies—for instance, that vacuum tube and solid state organs are simply a stepping stone towards a final, mature digital technology. Or—because many people consider digital organs flawed—that vacuum tube and solid state organs are a primitive version of the mature technology of analog integrated circuit organs, and that the digital organs are a corrupt, degenerate twist on an idea that should have been considered perfected one step earlier. Or perhaps that reed organs are an odd primordial experiment, justifiably overcome by a more mature electronic technology..

Because electronic organs themselves are often considered obsolete, strains of these arguments often appear whenever people talk about organs. Sometimes organs themselves are considered a casualty of a relentless march towards smaller, lighter, more customizable digital instruments. The digital organ, in this view, is just a malformed workstation. An organ has switches and presets, but they are dated and irrelevant. Compared to the mature technology of the workstation, a digital organ only makes one sound and it looks like it came out of your grandma's house. (Grandmas, the argument implies, cannot be musicians.)

But we should not mistake business practice for aesthetic judgment. Wurlitzer stopped making reed organs because they are big, complicated and labor-intensive. If customers were consistently lining up to buy reed organs at any price, Wurlitzer would probably still be here, happily churning them out to this day.

The second problem is that any teleological argument assumes a timeline that may or may not exist. Once Wurlitzer came up with a new design—as the argument implies—it promptly kicked the old one into the dustbin of history. But Wurlitzer often produced two technologies simultaneously. New reed organs were being made into the 1960s, overlapping with tube divider organs and possibly even early solid stage organs. A full timeline can (and should) be reconstructed from the records in the archive.

Furthermore, there is evidence that Wurlitzer provided technical support and parts for all of its organ designs throughout the life of the company. When Wurlitzer closed, its repair department was inherited by Morelock's Organ Service—and we were buying 1950s parts from Morelock's until 2022! Records in the archive could explain Wurlitzer's repair and technical support policies. In general, though, the evidence points to some level of coexistence among the different technologies.

For these reasons, our grouping by technology should not be taken as an endorsement of a teleological view of organ technology. In fact, as you browse the archive, we encourage you to start by considering all models of organ neutrally—as different types of "organ," not as different descendants of a common ancestor, or as intermediate stages of an increasingly better technology. Because organs are considered obsolete, many things about them have been forgotten. Approaching the archive from a neutral perspective can give us a more accurate feel for the instrument and its technology, without becoming misled by the stereotypes that have accumulated over the years.