The “A Major” and “E Major” buttons on my Optigan sound wrong. Are they?
Posted by peahix on April 23rd, 2006
Yes and no. From a musical standpoint, they’re very VERY wrong! But nothing is actually wrong with your Optigan. In order to fit enough stuff onto the discs, they had to cut corners a bit. There wasn’t enough room for A and E major, so they decided that they would take a C# dim chord (which has a couple of notes in common with A major) and use that for multiple chord buttons. Similarly, a G# dim serves as the E major. The best way to bolster the tonal implications of these chords is to back them up with full-fisted majors on the keyboard. Even then, you’re still only getting dominant 7ths with the third in the bass!