Grandma Organs Must Be Cheap

I have a Craigslist RSS feed on my Netvibes page that keeps me up-to-date on Bay Area organs for sale. I see the standard Hammond B3/C3/M3/M100/L100 posts asking for serious money, depending on condition, vintage, leslie, etc. I disregard those and search for the slew of grandma organs, those Kimball, Lowery, Baldwin, Rodgers, Yamaha, Wurlitzer, Thomas, and No Name behemoths with 1 or 2 manuals, a rhythm section, and usually bass pedals.

These are the postings that keep me amused. They are also the ones I'm interested in. The Kimball Caravan I use with Madame Blavatsky Overdrive was $80 or so (Goodwill) and is amazing, versatile and cuts through rock music as well as a Farfisa or Vox, IMHO. The majority of posters realize that they are stuck with large instruments that few people have any interest in and they request accordingly reasonable prices (from $1. to $100). That's fair. What amuses me are those who can't get over the fact that their Grandparents, Parents, Someone paid several hundreds or even thousands of dollars for something in the 70s or 80s that now has very little monetary value.

My advice: Never pay more than $100 for a grandma organ. Just wait. A deal is around the corner.

Walk into any small town Salvation Army and you'll see what I mean. Case in point: today I was in Red Bluff, Ca. Population 15,000. 1 Salvation Army. The organ pictured above was sitting there in the back room next to a TV and a sewing machine. $75.00. Worked perfectly fine. Sounded awesome, in fact. 2 manuals, loads of voices and rhythms, tremolo, sustain, percussion, etc. Try getting it home. You'll need a truck. That's why they must be cheap. The previous owner did the right thing here. They didn't try to sell it, they gave it away.

Even further back at this store was a weird looking piano with a cable coming from the bottom and 5 switches on the left hand side. It turned out to be a Roland organ. I even moved the plant on top and looked inside. No hammers, no harp, no strings. Just an old circuit board, an amp and speakers. Entirely contained within a piano case. The tag said sold. I turned it on and realized that 2 octaves around middle c didn't even generate sound... Maybe some collector knew something about it, and snatched it up with some scheme or another.

I can relate. I've been there several times before....