Crumar MOJO 61 Drawbar Keyboard

I bought this to replace my ageing Hammond XK1 and it’s increasingly untidy halo of pedals (Neo Vent 2, Lounsberry Tall and Fat etc.) I needed something neat and smart straight out of the box for my blues and soul band where we like to look sharp, and Hammond organ with a dash of piano and clav is what’s required. The Crumar Mojo 61 was exactly what I needed. It sounds even more like a Hammond than my XK1; the Rhodes and Wurlitzer pianos are very authentic; and the clav really comes alive. I won’t go into all the technical details- you can get these elsewhere - just a few of the little things that make live playing simpler, such as the fact that the swell pedal doubles as a wah for the clav, and a sustain pedal for the pianos works brilliantly as a Leslie slow/fast switch. The result is something clear, neat and logical with the minimum of extra wires, pedals and leads, which is great for a working band when space and setup times are limited. Just about all the controls you need are on the panel including percussion, reverb depth, key click, scanner chorus, cabinet sim (for the EPs and clav) and two banks of FX (again for the EPs and clav) comprising various tremolos and wah wah, and chorus or phaser. All very simple. There are no presets as such - it’s all very immediate and hands on, though the keyboard has WiFi and a simple editor accessible via smartphone or tablet and this allows you to select the model of Hammond, the amount of sproing in your clav, the bark and bite of your Rhodes, the model of amp you are simulating, and much else. Set and forget. I’ve added the optional 61B lower manual and this could hardly be simpler: it connects to the main board by MIDI and that’s it. Setup is easy and the result is cooler than a fridge in Antarctica. The Mojo 61 is monotimbral and the lower manual works only with the Hammond sim and is silent if you select the EPs, clav or other voices. You can’t have, say, organ on one manual and piano on the other. It’s a shame, though, that you can’t do that with the rather sweet baroque organ, or turn the Farfisa and Vox Conti sims into dual manuals. But as the Mojo is meant to be a Hammond first, and as I use it as such 90% of the time, this is not a major concern. I should add a note about the acoustic piano, of which everyone is strangely dismissive, perhaps because it’s a sample rather than a physical model. It’s great, full of body and character, and good enough for rock’n’roll. I use my Mojo with no extra FX (hooray!) straight into a pair of Yamaha DBR10 powered monitors. Righteous!!