Ferrofish B4000+

Eerlijk is eerlijk: er zijn modules op de markt die het geluid van een origineel toonwielorgel met rotaryspeaker een stuk beter emuleren. Met name de interne rotarysimulatie laat te wensen over, maar als je er een goede simulator of echte Lesliespeaker bij gebruikt is dit een dijk van een module. Het sterkste punt van deze B4000+ vind ik het gebruiksgemak. Weinig ingewikkelde menu's waar je doorheen moet ploegen, op zoek naar de door jou gewenste sound.
Al met al ben ik er best content mee. Maar als je niet beschikt over een degelijke leslie(simulatie) zijn er betere, maar wel iets duurdere alternatieven.

I bought the Ferrofish B4000+ B3 module for better organ sounding for duo on the base of Korg PA600, which lacks on organ drawbars and depends on samples only.

I connected both Ferrofish and PA600 over MIDI, both audio outs of B3 module to the Behringer mixer X-air XR18.
I do not believe that on old leslies could provide bass under 70Hz and High tones over 10kHz, so I put the Low and High cut, then I used small amount of Hall, Echo, Tubes and Pultec EQ on main audio out, headphones out I set totally dry, and voila, it comes perfect through the mix!
May be it is not perfect (Who is :)) but it is very very good!!!
I am learning the drawbar combinations, sound and percussion settings, rotor principle, and I am not missing anything any more...
Music has became more live, or with the melody with right hand or with accompainment with the left one.
Sound is pretty good, rotor whistles out, the drive groan...
I only had to make little cut for cca 2 dB from 1,5kHZ further in high frequencies...

Pros:
- very good sounding response on drawbars
- lot of possibilities for simulating the amps and B3
- great rotor simulation with lot of options
- i have to explore a little the percussions, I have to load last firmware with improvements for percussions
- I believe that the price is very affordable for both B3 module and Rotor simulator

Cons:
- at the beginning lot of combinations are not so easy to be managed
- sometimes strange behavoir at changing the parameters on main keyboard, so I have to learn a little (this item should stay in Pros area...)
- i can hear a little noise from the unit on the speakers

As you can see I am very very hapy...
May be not very best, but with little tweaking you can step out with pretty good sounding B3 simulation

Thanks to Thomann for great trade, fast delivery as always!

Regards,
Željko

What a superb unit. This is how it should be: buy a new instrument and it brings a smile to your face.

The unit is well built, solid metal case. Knobs and sliders feel high quality.

The sound is excellent and variable in so many respects. Used live it sounds utterly great. From thundering, growly distored sounds to sweet, whistling high notes and everything inbetween.

One of the things I found out after I purchased which I have not seen in any reviews is that all of the controls on the unit are midi assignable, so rather than having to dig through the menus your favourite parameter can be assigned to a controller on a master keyboard, or a pedal.

Some slight, very slight niggles now: first of all, the leslie simulation while generally good has a really sharp resonance at about 3k - enough that I have to use a 12dB notch filter to take it out. When playing live, and loud, it gave my fellow bandmembers a shock! It might pay for serious use to consider an external rotating speaker simulator unit.

Second, although the sound quality is great, it won't give you every tonewheel organ sound you ever wanted - there is a lot of subtle variation in the original hammond organs that this can't reproduce. Perhaps a Hammond XM2 would do better, but I've not played one and they are three times the price with the controller unit.

In terms of value for money though this is unbeatable. A thoroughly great organ unit for a few hundred euros. Well done Ferrofish - how about a Vox Continental simulator next?