Today I dug out my oldest Philicorda from the corner of my studio. The AG7500 is one of Philips first organ models. Released in 1963 it's packed with tubes both in the oscillators and in the amplifier. The amp,which also holds the spring reverb, is a separate unit mounted under the organ in the wooden stand.
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| One of the most elegant instruments in my studio |
My AG7500 has found its place in the corner since it hasn't been working properly ever since I bought it a couple of years ago. But today I gave it a try do fix at least some of the issues on it. The organ was out of tune, the reverb wasn't working, several of the keys didn't trigger any sound and others didn't return after pressing it.
I started of with opening it up to see if I could at least tune it and get a little better response in the keys. Tuning it worked out right, but the other issues were a little harder. I didn't actually understand where the keys made contact or how I could adjust the response or the springs of the keys.
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| The right part of the organs inner seen from above. The twelve square silver pieces are for tuning the oscillators. |
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| The left part of the organ seen from above. Input and output conectors to the right an the voicecards with lots of small lamps/tubes. |
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| The left half of the keyboard with the autochord part. Over that is the voice and vibrato selectors |
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| The right half of the keyboard with volume, balance (between chord and solo sounds), selector (for the inputs) and chord mode switch. |
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| Power unit and production label |
The AG7600 organ amplifier
The amplifier part with the spring reverb is an interesting piece in itself. It has a 5
pole DIN output and a 5 pole IEC input connector and I guess it could work quite well as amp for any kind of instrument. This means my next project with this little thing is to build a cable or modify the amp to make it possible to connect a 6,3 mm instrument output.
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| Production label of the amp |
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| Input, output, reverb amount knob and speaker outs of the amp |
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| The insides of the tube amp |
Since I couldn't get it running properly I wasn't able to make a sound demo of it, but you can find some nice clips by others on
youtube.
1 comment:
Hi Niels,
I have a Philicorda 7500 and a couple of the oscillators (I think that's what they are: those silver tuning towers) don't work. sounds like they are worn out at exactly the place you need them to be in terms of tuning when I twist the screw on top. Anyhow, I was wondering if you knew the values of these oscillators as I would like to see if I can replace them?
Thanks,
Harry
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