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, but my emails went unanswered. Rest in peace, brother!

An inevitable question is- which Optigan sample set is better, G-Force’s or Optigan.com’s? The answer depends on what the end user needs and values. Our sample set is meant to be purist and comprehensive, so it includes ALL of the known original Optigan/Orchestron/Talentmaker loops, presented in a straightforward, minimally processed fashion. This obviously allows for great flexibility so that the end user can import and manipulate the samples using whatever software s/he desires. The G-Force product is more of a closed system, though probably capable of much more immediate gratification and tempo-integration into a project. In other words, it works much more readily as a plug-in instrument. I haven’t tried it out yet myself, but it looks to be a quick and easy way to experiment with Optigan sounds.

First off, a 60-second radio spot for the Optigan:

Here’s an audio excerpt from the Dinah Shore TV show “Dinah’s Place,” dated Dec. 21, 1972. Barry Goldwater is the guest, and this clip features Goldwater attempting to play an Optigan whilst Shore attempts to sing along. Optigan had its first (and probably only) big promotional campaign during the 1972 holiday season, so this bit was most likely a part of that campaign. If anyone has a video copy of this, I’d love to get it from you!

Finally, we have a large number of songs written by someone named Arlene Buckner. As far as I can tell, these are demos of her songs, maybe recorded by something like a song-poem service, all featuring Optigan backing tracks. They are all published by Lark Ellen Music, ASCAP. The singer(s) are not identified, and I don’t know anything else about these songs. Neither Buckner nor her publishing company appear in ASCAP’s search engine. And since Mike is no longer with us to clue me in, I’ll probably never know for sure!

Beguine (sold for $159.50, 5 unique bidders)

Bossa Nova (sold for $203.50, 4 unique bidders)

Organ (sold for $177.50, 3 unique bidders)

Waltz Guitar (sold for $405.00, 4 unique bidders)

For the record, I didn’t bid on any of these, nor was I the seller.

In December 2010 we plan to release an experimental Optigan disc called “Musique Concrète,” which will essentially be a collage of 57 sound loops in the tradition of early electronic studio tape music. We’re completely disregarding the Optigan paradigm of chords and keys, and simply assigning a different abstract sound loop to each chord button and key. We thought that the most interesting approach for this disc would be to invite Optigoners everywhere to submit sound loops of their own making (please, no samples from commercial or copyrighted sources), from which we’ll choose the best for inclusion on the disc. All sounds chosen for inclusion on the disc will fall under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Unused sounds will revert back to their respective creators. We are unable to pay for submissions, but folks whose work appears on the disc will get a special discount off the retail price, and they will be credited on the disc jacket (most likely we will have a graphic depiction of the button/key layout with the artist identified for each).

So get to work! The deadline is Nov. 1st, 2010. You can submit as many loops as you like, the only real rules being that the loops must be exactly 2 seconds long (or we’ll alter them to fit that length) and in mono. Any sort of common file format (wav, mp3, aif, etc) will work. The final disc should have a nice balance of rhythmic, ambient, tonal and non-tonal loops to choose from. Keep in mind that the Optigan’s frequency response tops out at 5kH, and there’s a significant inherent noise floor, so it’s best to avoid subtle/quiet things or sounds that rely heavily on high frequencies. We will not be able to offer any sort of previews of the final sonic results for artist approval.

…and for some reason it seems folks are fairly interested in the music. It’s been pointed out that it comes from an Optigan (possibly from my sample set), but apparently some folks don’t believe it (?) I’m not sure why this has become some contentious issue, but I spent a couple minutes re-creating the ad music (sans the heavy reverb & slight time compression in the ad version- theirs is lower in pitch, but faster in tempo, mine is at the original unaltered pitch/tempo):

…and here’s the same thing reconstructed using loops from the original Optigan studio master tapes (and thus much higher fidelity):

After originally posting all of this, some folks inexplicably remained unconvinced or confused, so I made one final attempt to explain the whole thing with this video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The working title for “Swing It” was “Tommy Dorsey.” It was arranged & conducted by Art DePew, and played by members of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra. Here’s a demo they made of the arrangement during the recording session, strictly for in-house demo purposes to show how the chords should work together musically:

Note that in this demo, many of the chords are an alternate arrangement than the one that ended up on the final disc. Often they would record variations like this and choose the ones that worked best at a later time. Oh, and for those of you unfamiliar with the Optigan, the reason why this demo sounds so clear and the ad music sounds so lo-fi is simply due to the nature of transferring the studio quality music onto the optical discs and playing them back on a cheap piece of equipment. Optigan discs are inherently lo-fi, muddy and scratchy sounding. There’s no extra effects needed to make them sound that way.

Well anyway, hope that clears things up a little!

UPDATE:

This commercial is also discussed on this episode of the Sonic Talk podcast, including a clip from my video. Listen in around the 30 minute mark.

Robert spotted this Woolite commercial that uses a time-stretched riff from the Optigan “Big Band Beat” disc at the beginning.