Best Hammond setting for RD 88

"Which" Hammond B3 sound are you looking for?

It's a serious question -- 3 drawbars? Or 4? Jon Lord crunch? Gospel or jazz? Maybe all drawbars?

If you name a tune that we'll know, with the Hammond sound that you want, then we can try to help.

I do have an RD-88, but also a Crumar Mojo 61 (is now for sale) and a Hammond SK Pro 73 (just got it); and while I've played some with the Hammond scenes on the RD, I can't say I've spent a lot of time there.

Edited to add:
And thinking about it some more...

It just might be the Leslie speaker sound that Roland did not get right... That will be impossible to get on an RD without adding a Leslie-emulation pedal of some sort I think.

I did like the Jon Lord scenes on the RD; they're pretty close and respectable, as in his early days he relied more on Marshall stacks to get the heavy distorted "crunch" and only added Leslies later.

Old No7

Many thanks for taking the time to respond. If I can get close to Steve Winwood in Gimme Some Lovin' that'll do. And just to be clear, I only want to use the RD 88. Previously, I had a triple keyboard stand with my trusty old Roland RD 150 on the bottom, a 5-octave midi keyboard in the middle and my iPad on top for the GarageBand organs. It was all too much (and I smashed the iPad screen when I dropped it on the road!). Therefore, I'm back to my one instrument and that's it. Nothing fancy. I just want to be able to select a sound, maybe twiddle some of the knobs and hit the keys. Keep it simple. Does that help? I hope so. J 👍

You have 100 built in electric organs, many with specific drawbar settings.
There are an additional 80 electric organs in EX Zed 08.
Finally, there are two rotary effects, Rotary and VK Rotary.

The default settings for the rotaries are "not bad."

Not sure there is much to do other than to start digging through the sounds. Turn off the effect, and listen to the dry organ sound

Once you find one that sounds good dry, then time to start playing with the rotaries. Leave the overdrive turned off. The most dramatic settings are the individual tweeter / woofer fast & slow speeds and spread. Once the static sounds are good, then adjust the transition times. Finally, you have the woofer / tweeter levels, and high low gain.

As Old No7 said, there's no such thing as a Hammond sound, rather there are tons of Hammond sounds. The majority of organ sounds in the RD88 are Hammond emulations (or as close as the RD88 comes to them). As DesertBoat basically said, just go through them and find some that are closest to what you want, and then tweak the rotary/overdrive effects to taste. (The organ sounds in the board are basically not adjustable, except for their effects.)

That said, the RD88 isn't going to give you anything like a Garageband quality emulation... Garageband gives you a pretty nice modeled emulation of a Hammond organ, RD88 just has some samples it can play back (through effects). The RD88 simply doesn't have the same quality of organ, and if it doesn't have the particular drawbar setting you want, there's no way to create it. Basically, the RD88 isn't an organ, it's better looked at as a piano that happens to have some organ sounds in it. It's not nearly as good for organ as Garageband is.

I know you want to keep it simple, but if you're willing to even add a smartphone, you can get much better organ sounds. Look at the VB3m app, it's a high quality, low-priced organ app that runs on iPhone and also on many Android phones. RD88 is good at controlling sounds over MIDI, and the phone is small enough to velcro down onto the RD88 for safety.

I appreciate all that you say here, just as I appreciate previous comments by other posters. In order to keep things as simple as possible, I want to stick with this one keyboard, so although I understand what you say about adding some more hardware via midi, I don't particularly want to be expanding in that way. What I have found is a pretty reasonable compromise which is to add an overdrive pedal (a Mojo Mojo) that the guitarist had lying around. By tweaking the Perc Rotary Organ (instrument 109) a little and then clicking on the pedal I am already pretty close to what I want for the few numbers on which I play organ (and we don't play all that often anyway, hence my reluctance to dive down a whole load of rabbit holes in search of an elusive sound). I've also downloaded the parameters pdf so I'll have a good look at that and see what I might play with. For example, I have no idea (yet) of the difference between Rotary and VK Rotary, so that'll be the first thing that I'll investigate. It's just a question of balance: investigating this versus all the other demands on my time. I'm quite excited about what I've found thus far, so the (intermittent) journey shold also be good fun. J 👍