John Check wrote: "Now that I chewed on it..... Okay, one way to approximate this would be to have the longer pipes have an attack envelope that's modulated by velocity. Slower press, wider spray of attacks across the pipes. Velocity ain't just for volume anymore. If there's a gap where you can hold a note and not get all the tonewheels, aftertouch might be our friend instead. So a set of samples for each draw bar at appropriate intervals with levels bound to controllers for the pipe mixing and attack envelopes on the longer pipes bound to velocity going through a reverb/chorus/leslie stack of plugins (or better yet outboard gear) gives you about everything but the beatbox. It'd take 128 mono voices to pull off 8 drawbars @ 16 note poly. It's debatable whether sampling the rotors is worth the bits vs simulating them, if we ignore the freq response of the speaker cabinet." The velocity idea sounds interesting. It's subtle things like that that give an instrument 'feel', even if the player isn't really aware that there is anything clever going on behind the scenes. I'd like to know what having the higher drawbars get louder+faster attack envelope with higher velocity was like as well. I know that's nothing like a hammond works, but it would be fun to try, and I think it would be quite different from using a low pass filter opened by velocity on each note.
