On March 14, 2020, virtuoso musician, Jordan Rudess, played a landmark concert in Mexico City as the guest keyboardist of legendary rockers, Deep Purple, using only IK Multimedia’s acclaimed Hammond B-3X virtual instrument as his sole organ sound.

Jordan used Hammond B-3X on an iPad Pro 3rd Generation played by a Korg Kronos, Jordan’s preferred controller. This Mexico City concert was the first time in the more than 50 years of the band’s career that a virtual instrument was used to create the classic, timeless overdriven organ sound that the band is known for.

Original Deep Purple organist, Jon Lord, created the iconic rock organ tone by playing a Hammond B-3 into Marshall guitar amps to give it the weight and power of a rock guitar tone. 5 decades later, IK Multimedia recreates this classic sound in the digital domain using state-of-the-art modeling of the Hammond organ, Leslie speaker and various tube amplifiers from the various Leslie amp models to guitar amp models taken from AmpliTube. This along with a 5-effect stomp box pedalboard and a top studio quality Post FX section with console EQ and a stereo FET compressor allowed Jordan to recreate all of the fire and majesty of Jon Lord’s original legendary organ tone in an ultra-portable iPad.

Watch some footage from the show as Jordan plays along with the Hammond B-3X organ app on his iPad:

IK product manager, Erik Norlander, flew to New York to work with Jordan on voicing the presets for his Deep Purple show.  All 24 of those custom Deep Purple presets will be made available in the forthcoming update of Hammond B-3X for both iPad and Mac/PC. Also included in the coming update is iPad preset sharing so that presets can be easily moved back and forth between the iPad and desktop versions of Hammond B-3X. The update will be free to all Hammond B-3X users.

Photo courtesy of Rogelio Matamoros.