GEAR TALKIN’™️ #12: The Optigan

The Wilco Loft’s mostly-chipboard, faux wood-grained plastic optical turntable keyboard

Mark is taking the reins today and sharing a GEAR TALKIN’™ as I finish up Wilco’s current tour and the first draft of my next book. More to come when I’m back in Chicago next week.

OxO — Jeffy

After this tour I’m coming back to wrestle this jerk-wad.

Hello from Gear Talkin’, USA!

Today’s loving dissertation is on the merits and utility of this somewhat rare and singular instrument, the Optigan.

The better-sounding Loft Optigan (thanks to our old intern, Ziggy).

One subcategory of music-making devices that we have deep love for and have written about in the past is the ready-to-go, instant music-making “parlor” type instruments, made more for family fun in the rec room or around a campfire than to end up in the hands of more serious music makers. They’re usually not constructed from quality materials or totally tonally tuned. They’re intended for your everyday bub who wants to jump into singalongs but doesn’t want to spend the time to, you know… learn how to play.

In the early part of the 20th century these types of shortcut contraptions spread by way of traveling salesmen and Sears catalogs. Autoharps! Player pianos! Marxophones! Chord organs! Everyone loves instant music. But this wasn’t just an old-fashioned phenomenon. I remember visiting the Melody Shop, the piano/guitar/sheet music store at the Northpark Mall in Dallas, Texas (right around the corner from Furr’s Cafeteria) in the early 80’s to play with their new-fangled Casio PT-50 keyboard that was permanently tethered to a display table at the front of the store (it’s probably still attached to that table at the bottom of some landfill). It made instant “fully orchestrated” music at the touch of a button or two with different rhythms and basslines and tempos and voices to choose from with names like celesta, flute, and trumpet. People of all ages, shapes, and dress codes would stand in line waiting for their turn to mess around with it for a few minutes while the rest of the line begrudgingly became their audience. 

In the early 70’s, toy giant Mattel produced one of the most unique and actually useful instruments in this subgroup in the form of an optical disc-reading organ called the Optigan. It was made mostly of chipboard and faux wood-grained plastic and housed a keyboard, spinning turntable, optical eye, and two 8” speakers. Optigan: Opti = optical eye. Optical organ. Optigan. Get it? It’s a portmanteau! This somewhat elevated toy would be able to read 12” spinning floppy film discs and turn their circular-printed waveforms into prerecorded music tracks across its chromatic keyboard, as well as read beats and bassline progressions that interacted with a series of chord buttons much like those on an accordion. 

And sure, the Optigan is often described as a toy Mellotron, as both utilize the chromatic playing of prerecorded soundtracks. But it’s the inclusion of the rhythm-with-basslines chord organ button section that helps make the Optigan more of a complete zero-to-sixty ballad-backing bonanza. Mattel made a series of these film discs, which allowed the player to easily switch up styles, time signatures, and instrumentation. They had fantastic titles such as  “Latin Fever”, “The Joyous Sounds of Christmas”, “Polynesian Village”, and one of my favorites, “Movin’”.

We have two pretty OK-working Optigans at the Loft with a complete set of discs. These were designed for family and friends to gather ‘round and join together in song without needing to hire a ringer to man the organ. Within minutes, you could become your neighborhood’s own Lenny Dee. Yes, I know. I see your mouth forming the words “there’s an app for that!” But come on, it’s not the same thing. There is a look and feel to these old mildewy and splintery dinosaurs that, admittedly, in modern days take up too much space for the very few things they actually can do but somehow are still worth the trouble. There’s a smell to these things when they warm up ... like burning hair. There’s a wonkiness inherent in the cheap mousetrap-type construction. There’s a “will it or won’t it” each time you plug it in and fire it up. If you ask me, our lives need more character-building uncertainty like that. Or do they? I’m not sure...

This Week In Wilco, Etc.

1991 / April 24: Uncle Tupelo opens for Billy Bragg at the Graham Chapel at Washington University in St. Louis.

2022 / April 27: “Falling Apart (Right Now),” the first single from Cruel Country, is released by dBpm Records.

2002 / April 30: Wilco appears on Late Night with David Letterman and performs “War on War.”