Renato Lombardi
Italian amp and sound engineer, the man largely responsible for what Brian Auger's Hammond sounds like on record and stage.^[raw/articles/doctormix-rarest-hammond.md]
The resistor and the free PA stacks
Years before the power-unit incident (see below), Auger was playing a club in Italy to an almost empty room. A man in the audience — Lombardi — told him he could fix his whole sound. The problem: Auger was taking a direct out from the organ, and the signal was far too hot. Lombardi took all of Auger's equipment away, fitted a resistor that dropped the organ's output to roughly a quarter of its level, brought it back, and threw in two full stacks of PA for free. Auger heard it and said: "that's my sound. There it is."^[raw/articles/doctormix-rarest-hammond.md]
When Auger pressed to pay, Lombardi refused — with the best sales pitch in organ history: there had been three other organ players at that gig, and "I already sold this three times."^[raw/articles/doctormix-rarest-hammond.md] He also built Auger's amplifier. Per the Doctor Mix documentary: "He is a large part of why Brian Auger sounds like Brian Auger."^[raw/articles/doctormix-rarest-hammond.md]
The rescue call
Decades later, at the start of a European tour, Auger's 1956 C3 Hammond — a US 110 V / 60 Hz instrument needing a cycle converter in Europe (see tonewheel-generator and portable-hammonds) — was plugged into the wrong socket (220 V instead of 110 V) and blew its internal circuit. The Italian engineer who answered the emergency call and fitted the replacement power unit still in the organ today was Lombardi, already a long-standing fixture in Auger's life.^[raw/articles/doctormix-rarest-hammond.md]
Related
- brian-auger — his most famous client
- hammond-b3 — the instrument whose signal he tamed
- portable-hammonds — the 50/60 Hz cycle problem behind the rescue