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[continued
from page 3]
I
eventually made it home, though, and wrestled the thing
into the house myself. The first thing you notice about
the Optigan (if you have any imagination at all, that
is) is how malleable this technology was. You can do all
sorts of things with the discs to sabotage the sound-
put them in upside down, put several in at once, manually
stop and start them with your hands for record scratch
effects, press all the buttons at once, and so on. Most
of the sounds that were recorded for the keyboard section
are different kinds of sustained organs. Since the disc
spins constantly, the sounds just keep looping around
and around. So the keyboard sounds can't have a beginning
and end per se. (Something like a piano sound wouldn't
work because a piano has a percussive attack transient
followed by a slow decay. On the Optigan, you would just
get a piano note striking over and over.) The drums and
accompaniments keep looping as well- if you want to start
on the downbeat, you have to keep watching this little
flashing metronome that blinks red at the beginning of
each bar. Otherwise you can cut in and out of each loop
whenever you want- the buttons just turn the sound on
and off.
Since
any sound could be encoded on these discs, the organs
are actually pretty nice- big Hammond
B3's and Mighty
Wurlitzers. The drums are often
pretty beefy sounding, though "lo-fi" is definitely
the phrase that comes to mind. The rest of the accompanimental
instruments usually sound kind of claustrophobic, but
again that's part of the sick charm of the instrument.
Some of the discs even have non-musical sound effects
(such as applause) on them.
You
would think that, since the discs are not played by physical
contact, there would be no pops or scratches such as on
vinyl records. But this is not the case- tiny scratches
on the discs cause irregular defractions of light which
in turn end up sounding exactly like record scratches!
Most of the time, though, this actually improves the sound.
You get the weird feeling that you're listening to a cheesy
old Enoch
Light record but that you're
actually controlling where the music goes!
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