Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse passed away on March 6, 2010. Mark was a big Optigan fan/user (hear the Optigan “Guitar in 3/4″ disc in the above song), and I had corresponded with him a bit over the years. Recently I had been trying to get in touch with him about doing a Sparklehorse Optigan disc, [...]

Thanks to Rich Jeffery for this bit of Opti-spotting, this time the “Champagne Music” disc on “Upside Down” by Paloma Faith:

G-Force software have released an Optigan virtual instrument of sorts called the Opti-Tron. Clicking on the link takes you directly to their site, where you can read about what it does. In a nutshell, they’ve sampled a bunch of Optigan discs and processed the loops to all lock together, allowing for free mixing and matching [...]

MELLODRAMA, the Mellotron documentary, has just been released on DVD. Pea appears briefly in the film, discussing the Optigan. Many other Optigan pals appear in the film too, including Mattias Olsson, Zac Rae, Brian Kehew (honorary Optigan fan- he won’t admit it himself), Woody Jackson, etc.

Hi all-
Regular visitors will note the redesigned interface here at optigan.com. Thanks to J for all his hard work on this! The main point of the redesign was to bring the site into current web specs so that I can quickly/easily add/update every aspect of the site (which I couldn’t do with the old site). [...]

This is a demo of a project that’s actually been kicking around for a few years, but is currently on the back-burner. But I figured it at least deserves a demo video. This is an Optigan (actually the first one I ever owned) that’s been converted to a MIDI controller (aka the Midigan) for the [...]