Optigan

If there are any Talentmaker owners out there who are looking to get high-quality dupes of the entire 20-disc set, email me directly for details ASAP!

Marcel Groot pointed us to this fantastic Optigan segment on Kunststof TV, a Dutch arts talk show. Marcel is seen first in the clip demonstrating the Optigan, and then we see Nico Brandsen live in the studio, totally shredding probably better than anyone has since Johnny Largo himself! Such a segment, especially one of this length, would be unheard of on American TV!!

Here’s not one, but two articles on our good friend Laurie Anderson‘s recent visit to the Cantos Music Foundation in Calgary. Notable are the pics of her playing the Optigan, and her comments about it. In fact, if you look really close, you might see a couple of optigan.com discs in the lower pic… Laurie also gives a shout-out to the Optigan in this recent interview on the CBC radio show Q.

Photograph by: Ted Rhodes, Calgary Herald

Got this email from Bill Perison, who says of his new CD:

The main song that might be of interest to Optigan fans is Uncle John’s Optigan,  about a kid making up songs on an Optigan while visiting his Uncle John.  All the backing track is Optigan loops.  I guess I should clarify that I used samples played back from in Reason and the M-Tron Pro plugin rather than an actual Optigan. I think that the M-Tron folks played with a couple of tempos.  I had a line on getting one but ended up travelling out to Ontario to record this project. Anyway, it was very fun to write this - O how I wish my Uncle really DID have an Optigan – I must say though, his old Lowrey boom-chucka, boom-chicka organ was pretty cool.

I also use Optigan as a rhyme in the 4th verse of Got To Rhyme. That verse goes…..

_______________________________

A leprechaun named Little-John

Was floating on the Amazon

Whereupon he met Yvonne,

A very nice mastodon.

He offered her a sweet bonbon

In the shape of an hexagon

And found she lived in Babylon

With a fawn, and a swan and an old optigan.

__________________________

No actual optigan sounds in this track though.

Optigan.com has just made its annual donation to cancer research, in memory of Mike Le Doux, the guy responsible for making all those Optigan discs in the early 70s. 10% of the proceeds from our Optigan Archives Vol. 1 sample set goes to cancer research, and this year $220.00 goes to the Jimmy Fund. Please consider making a donation of your own!

OK, so from the positive response we got on a previous thread, we’ll be going ahead with plans to make Optigan versions of Talentmaker discs. Now, there’s a related project that we’re also contemplating- making direct copies of actual Talentmaker discs, for use in Talentmakers. Given the scarcity of the instrument, and the costs associated with making quality copies, this isn’t a project that we can just charge headlong into, so again we’re asking the Talentmaker owning community to weigh in on this. Basically, the only way we could really make this work is to make complete sets of all 20 TM discs for purchase in a bundle. These sets will only be made to order, and we won’t offer them as a regular stock item on the site. We don’t have an exact pricepoint yet, but it will be in the ballpark of $1000 for the set- could be a bit more, could be a bit less, depending. So what do you think? Please leave a comment and let us know if you’d be a serious buyer for this set. The discs themselves would be virtually indistinguishable from the originals, apart from the addition of some text in the label area to indicate that it’s a copy.

NOW SHIPPING!

Like our popular PIANOSCAPE disc, VIBRASCAPE presents the sound of the vibraphone in a uniquely Optigan fashion. The keyboard tones are arranged as a series of rhythmic patterns that create hypnotic, pulsating soundscapes when chords are played. (This disc is not particularly suited to melodic playing). The chord buttons feature sustained bowed vibraphone chords. The special effects switches help keep the groove going with a selection of rhythms from the Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2, an old-school beatbox and technological contemporary of the Optigan. Optigans equipped with a spring reverb will provide the most haunting sound, which is further enhanced by inserting the disc upside-down for backwards play.

LEFT HAND: Bowed Vibraphone.
RIGHT HAND: Vibraphone Rhythms.
SPECIAL EFFECTS SWITCHES: 1. Samba, 2. Rhumba, 3. Bossa Nova, 4. Bolero, 5. Go-Go.

Vibraphone played and recorded by Mark Greenberg
Music produced, edited, and mastered by Pea Hicks.
Disc creation software, disc production cover artwork and jacket layout by Robert Becker.
Photography by Pea Hicks.

Pea was recently interviewed by a robot for Jeff Boller’s Songs & Sonics blog. Jeff is the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist behind The Simple Carnival. Featured in the interview is an unfinished an unreleased Optiganally Yours demo track. Definitely check out both links! Thanks Jeff!!

Surly Pea at Optigan, photo by Chad Thompson

(Thanks also to Chad Thompson Photography!)

Because of buggy software updates, we had to switch to yet another webstore, but Shoptigan is now up and running again. We’re still working out a few kinks in the layout, etc, but you should be able to place orders now without any problems.

Hi all, the forums are currently plagued with spambots, despite all the spambot security features being enabled. We’re not sure where the security hole is, but for the moment we’re having to laboriously manually delete each spambot. Hopefully we’ll get this figured out soon, though we may have to switch to an entirely new forum. Thanks for your patience.