The Enchanting LoFi Textures Of An Optical Sound Sampler
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 พ.ย. 2024
- Listen to the "Talentmaker Takes" EP on my bandcamp: hainbach.bandc...
The Chilton Talentmaker is one of the first samplers, or rather loop players. Like the slightly more famous Mellotron, it allows playback of recorded instruments, but it can play them back as loops. This allows for all kind of endless playback of music, from "German Band" and "Polka Band" to "Waltz Guitar", made famous through Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine Of A Spotless mind" soundtrack.
The Chilton and its close relatives, the Optigan and Orchestron, were used by Kraftwerk, David Lynch, Tom Waits, The Clash and many more.
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We definitely need more VST's of these classic instruments before they vanish completely.
It's just what I was thinking about working on next. 😊
There is an optigan soundbank aivable, they also have the master tape use for build the optical disc.
@@Meteotrance will people pay between $89.99 to $189.99 for the Optigan source material which a developer would have to purchase from the official Optigan site even if the VSTi was given away free?
ioptigan app
yes yes yes i do😮😮😮
David Lynch, Devo, Kraftwerk... All of their art resonates deeply with my soul, and so does this piece of gear, wow, i really wish i could get my hands on this thing
Look at Panoptigon, new remake of this
fudging amazing! you tracked one down, themz be awesome!
Absolutely! You gotta get some sun screen and head over to Italy to mate!
He'll fit it in the back of the mini somehow 😂
@@Hainbach ill need to go in winter hahaha. yeah blooomin awesome. btw im trying to find a magazine and reply about that machine you messaged about (not one int vid)!!! cus there is a very similar one i was researching but different, maybe itll make a surprise for the bach! such a cool machine the talentmaker
Tom waits organs for years!
We are waiting for you!
All of those early ”samplers” sound so magical. A friend of mine have managed to collect Optigan, Orchestron, Talentmaker and a bunch of Mellotrons and there is something mezmerizing with the grit and wobbliness of the physical media producing the sounds. Gets me every time ❤
that's a fairly small number of people.... is his name brian? or pea? 😂
@@duncan-rmi Nope. Mattias in Roth Händle Studios (Stockholm/Sweden)
@@gusseDSX yeah, he was my next guess! I was on the old mellotronists mailing list years ago, when there was the 'range war' going on over ownership... this was long before nord or the softsynth versions, & while people were still fighting over the master tapes. I have some of the old TD sets in my collection, but the poor old thing pretty much stays at home these days.
@@gusseDSX I just saw his band Änglagård recently in his studio, and the studio was just filled with a million different synthesizers and keyboards, i've never been in a cooler place. Änglagård were also amazing
@@mannkejns4355 I was at one of the two shows in the studio as well. Awesome concert and magical chaotic studio
This video just solved a personal mystery! I have an early childhood memory of handling what appeared to be floppy, translucent, record albums, and could never figure out what I was recalling. My grandpa had an Optigan organ in his garage, which I used to play around with as a child. When you pulled out the discs, those memories came flooding back.
My dad was Mattel's director of product development. He left Mattel to become Optigan's marketing director. (He was responsible for such coups as getting Monty Hall to give one away on Let's Make A Deal.) This turned out to not be a great career move, but oh well. We had one in our home, of course.
One thing the Optigan had that the Chilton does not is that there's a light that shone through the near-center of the disc and emerged in a little hole above the keyboard. There are four (or three, depending on the time signature of the chords) equidistant windows arranged around the center hole of the disc, one of them red. As a result you get a flashing visual indicator of the beat, a red dot on the downbeat and white ones on the rest.
It looks like the Chilton's pitch control was better than the Optigan's, which was a thumbwheel controlling a worm gear, so that you could make fine adjustments in pitch but not broad ones.
But! Here's something that works with the Optigan, and might with the Chilton. There's a linkage between the front door and the motor, so that the motor is stopped while you're changing disks, and goes back up to speed when you insert one and close the door. You can open the door slightly while you're playing, which will _reduce_ power to the motor, allowing you to introduce random warble, or, in the extreme position, get the same effect you got with half-speed playback on the Nagra.
You've already discovered the double-disk trick. Try putting a disk in upside down.
Making new disks was a crazy operation in the 1970s involving very expensive computer time and plotters. It seems like today it would be a relatively small matter of programming. Making an image of concentric soundtracks and printing them out as an image that can be transfered to a transparent acetate disk seems well within the skill set of someone who knows a bit about graphics software and printing. The biggest technical challenge is transforming the imagery of the sampled soundtrack into a circle whose circumference is comprised of the entirety of the soundtrack, so that everything plays back in sync and at the right pitch.
Our Optigan did not survive a cross-country move, and in 1981 there wasn't an appetite for this instrument anymore, so instead of finding someone to repair it we relegated it to the barn in my family's old farmhouse in Maine, where it was not really protected from the elements enough. I'm sad to say we ended up breaking it down with a sledgehammer to make it easier to take to the dump.
Thank you so much for sharing, that is wonderful information!
At 3:54 he puts the disk upside down.
Nice story! Thanks! The product site was in Italy in the Gem Factory. Do you have some informations?
Is there anything more satisfying than Hainbach exploring strange, vintage gear?
I love how you made it sound like you with the Nagra and experiments. Wonderful stuff.
Edit: The triple disc! My word, what a sound.
Thank you buddy!
What a wonderful instrument, and around 5:15 when you were leaning on the keyboard reminded me of sounds on a record of sounds effects I bought in the 80's from the BBC radiophonic workshop.
Someone should make a plugin with these sounds. Someone should also design a plugin that 'Opticalizes' any sound coming in. It's absolutely magical.
Yeah the latter would really interest me. You can get the Geforce Mellotron plugin with the Optigan expansion. The sounds are there. And I have an artist pack with them, too, with my own sounds: www.gforcesoftware.com/products/hainbach-artist-expansion/
god, a sampling software that could emulate the "masking" effect of layering two discs on each other would be fucking amazing.
@@optigandotcomwill it include talent maker and orchestron for the Plug-in?
There is already an iOS version of the Optigan it’s great fun and has many discs available. 😊
Ça fait rêver des premiers SF.
Huge mad props 👌 for mentioning coil. That's a group that deserves so much more love than it gets! 🙏🙏🙏✌️
Coil did a better mix of NIN closer than anyone should of been capable of. The film 7even was improved by the track's very presence.
@@parasiteunit Amen brother!!!🙏🙏🙏 I'm on the same wavelength of that emotion 👍 the coil mixes that they did for nails change my LIFE!!! and is what led me to them. after I heard those mixes I got "black light district" and "unnatural history" 1 and 2 and never looked back! 🎹🎚️🎛️🎧😵💫👌... R.i.p. John and Peter 🙏✋✌️
8:35 oh wow, that doubled up sound is incredible!
The band Optagonally Yours is fantastic!!!!
Ein überaus faszinierendes Instrument! Ich erinnere mich an einen Besuch der Musikmesse Frankfurt anfang der 70er, wo ich dieses Instrument live erleben konnte, erst heute habe ich durch dieses Video erfahren, wie es funktioniert. Herzlichen Dank dafür ❣️
I knew id heard the samples on this before. Jon Brion used it for the soundtrack of eternal sunshine, specifically the song Phone Call. Such a beautiful sound
As a big Optiganally Yours fan, this makes me very happy!
Would be fun to have two of the same discs, with one upside down to get a forward/reverse effect - fascinating!
I’ll try tomorrow! Great idea!
"It's a Wonderful LIfe" by Sparklehorse is one of my all time favourite albums - Optigan/Orchestron plus Chamberlin and Mellotron. Hard to know what is used where but your examples really reminded me of that record. The stuff that happens when you turn the disk upside down or put in 2 is so cool. Thanks for giving us a chance to see it in action. The idea of a large floppy optical disk seemed so ridiculous to me but the analogy to film sound makes perfect sense now
❤ Sparklehorse too
Yes I got the Sparklehorse connection! So sad he left us too soon.
I had no idea Sparklehorse used these (or frankly that they even existed), but the second I heard that sound, I thought, "that sounds like 'It's a Wonderful Life'". Looked it up, and sure enough, that's what they used! Pretty cool.
wow it sounds so authentic, exactly the analog tone you want from an analog machine. some tape machines ive heard dont even produce this sort of texture and coloring.
Hipsters loved Optigan samples. I used to hear them all the time in commercials about a decade ago. Although the audio quality was much worse, the big advantage with these optical disc organs is that you could play the samples repeatedly, whereas the tapes in a Mellotron would run out after about 7 to 8 seconds and stop until you gave them time to rewind.
I remember reading that the engineers who worked on the Optigan planned ways to improve the audio quality of the optical discs, such as pre-emphasis and noise reduction, but since Mattel (who manufactured it) was a toy company, they couldn't justify the expense to implement these features. And in the '90s, someone found the original studio master tapes that were used to produce the Optigan discs (most of which were recorded in Germany), and used them to make perfect digital-quality versions of them, but people still prefer the lo-fi sound of the real ones.
Oh yeah, I remember seeing some commercial in 2015 or so that used, I think it was the "Swing It!" disk's samples, and being like "Ooh I should email Pea Hix about that so he can find the TH-cam copy and post it on his blog" and then I never did.
Also someone made a royalty-free backing track out of the "da-da-di-da"s from "Singing Rhythm" and Lindsay Ellis used it a few times in her videos.
This thing is beyond lofi- it's practically nofi. I love the idiosyncratic sound of this thing!
Apparently on Beautiful World by Devo they had an Optigan & had every disc it came with stacked on top of eachother. Apparently you can also get acetate sheets & cut them into circles & free hand squiggles onto them in felt tip pen & get some interesting sounds.
I once read an interview with Mark Mothersbaugh back in the early '80s. In one of the segments, he talked about putting in the disks in an Orchestron backwards (or upside down) and having it make sucking sounds.
Incredible!! This NEEDS to be an AudioThing plugin 😉
This is the most amazing machine, that I have ever seen! The grunge of age, gives the loops such an eerie ambience. They've matured to perfection. xo
5:15 1960's sci fi movie/tv sound effect. Like some gadget doing a thing on original Star Trek, etc
This machine is freaking fantastic. Layering of the discs, even in reverse is such a nice hack!
Yup a gnarly sounding keyboard that uses optical discs & will make great space themed chill tunes!🙂👍🙂 Sounds great!🎵🎵🎵
The Rhythms and sounds are so space age pop/exotica such a cool machine thanks so much for sharing.
You have everything you need in a single machine to entertain all of your guests at the coctail party.
That bit at the end is like an alternative history of EDM if it developed 40 years earlier
I absolutely adore these types of machines, i def don't have room now but I can hope for one day to have my own space just for sounds
That's the most idiophonic instrument I've ever heard, the keyboard sounds you got from putting a second disk in it were so fragile, warm and intimate !
Steve Hackett used these on his first solo albums and live concerts. Really amazing sound, then and now.
This is one of those gem pieces of gear you can’t believe you haven’t heard of. Holy god
Beautiful sound
The main advantage of the Orchestron or this Chilton Talentmaker over the Mellotron was loops. On a Melotron your playback time is roughly 8 seconds only, the length of the piece of tape, hence you can't get a long sustained choir pad like, the most known, Radioactivity made with a Vako Orchestron. Some of the Orchestrons sample libraries were actulay made with the same sonic material as the one used for the Mellotron. The drawback of course is you don't get any attack or envelop from the sampled instrument, you play somewhere on the loop.
I've been in the studio with so many people borrowing my m400, & always tell them "eight seconds is longer than you think!"
@@duncan-rmi Yep eight seconds is a long time within the context of a song.
@@duncan-rmi Yes, most of the time 🙂
This thing is super cool and it seems to have endless possibilities within it
I was a massive fan of Sparklehorse back in the day and I can definitely hear this instrument in his Lo Fi tracks. Of course I had no idea it was this producing the sounds!
I really like your work, greetings from Rome
I love my Sennheiser MD-21. It's been my desk mic for 15 years.
I love them - one is always with me, and the other is always on my old AKAI sampler
Get in touch if you ever want to author sounds for a new Optigan disc! :)
Oh you do that! Can you send me an email to Hainbach101 at gmail.com?
@@Hainbach we've been making new Optigan & Orchestron discs since 2008. We even make a new instrument called Panoptigon to play them more reliably than the old hardware. We've yet to make any new Talentmaker titles because there are so few Talentmakers out there that the demand is very minimal. Anyway, we'll send an email!
Ooooh! So very close to being a Vaco Orchestron, it may as well be one....... NICE! Looking forward to watching this tonight.
The Orchestron and Talentmaker were both offshoots of the Optigan's technology. Mattel owned Optigan but it's president (F. Roy Chilton) left the company and in 1973 introduced the Talentmaker using the same technology but supposedly with some technical upgrades. Optigan went out of business and was taken over by Miner Industries under the company name Opsonar, who pursued legal action against Chilton (it wasn't Mattel who tried to get Chilton to stop producing the Talentmaker, as mentioned in the video). The Orchestron, however, was made by a former Moog technician and salesperson, again using the technology of the Optigan. In fact, the first Orchestrons (Model A) were identical to the Optigan. The later versions were based on Talentmaker designs. Some later included other things like sequencers and synthesizers (Model X and Phase 4) ... but those were mostly prototypes, I think.
Reminds me of low budget 1970s movies - a welcome sound for nostalgic ears 👍
looking forward to seeing your collab with Tom Waits
Cool Idea, nice that it was realized and is honored and presented here. Thanks man, again!
I can think of no one more perfect to demonstrate this amazing instrument ❤
I had two Optigon keyboards in my studio at one time, purely by coincidence. There was a folder with a set of those plastic discs.
We used them to try and find that weird overdub to give a song that magical lo fi thing that everyone loves but
nobody can figure out what it is.
I love these ancient machines, harking back to "modern" film makers and theatrical sound fun. Thanks for your review
3:20 Holy shit that's gloriously depressing. Really powerful, especially if you're backing a visual medium like film or stage.
I had fun watching this, I can't imagine how much fun this must be to explore in person! Great work!
Wonderful instrument, delightful video! Rare machine, thanks for showing it to us!
SO fun ... u know years ago in a record shop they had a whole bunch of these optigon discs hanging from the ceiling ... I never knew till now what they WERE, Merci
That is a really cool and interesting sound machine. What makes it even better is that it's not the Miami Sound Machine.
The sequence at 1:43 reminded me Brian Eno's _I'll come running to tie your shoes_ from Another Green World album.
I fell in love with this after hearing Optigan 1 by Blur
this thing makes some really crazy sounds!
It's always fun to take an instrument and do unimaginable or unintended things with it. You can come up with some amazing sounds sometimes.
Holy Guacamole, ... Not a clue this thing existed, and I am 54 and deeply into music in my teens till late twenties, having played in 3-4 bands along the way ... And I am German!!!! ... I should know this, but no!!! ..... Just goes to show that you should know your music history so you don't sound ignorant (not stupid!) as me in this post ... Learn! Listen! Enjoy! ... So much to learn! .... Thanks for this video!
Love the bonus crackle. Reminds me of my 78 rpm discs. Very much part the experience. Vinyl is so passe. Shellac is it, Baby.
8:35 - This part’s magic!
70s lofi
indeed fascinating
So so nice! I love this one in Sparklehorse songs, specially in “It’s a Wonderful Life” ❤
I used to repair Optigans in the 70s. Horribly crude mechanisms but surprisingly effective. They needed a stepdown transformer to operate in Australia (240 to 110 volts) and the drive motor would overheat due to running on 50Hz rather than 60Hz. The motor running on a partial DC supply (for the speed control) didn't help either.
Very odd device. I've worked in a dozen or more music stores and never seen one of these artifacts. Thanks for sharing this with the world.
Goldfrapp-y vibes.. beautiful
So much haunting beauty!
And at other times you anticipate a phat beat dropping in at any second.
Very cool. The Mellotron Sound Card 4 for use in their digital M4000D Mellotron series has 128 total sounds from the Talentmaker, Optigan and Orchestron instruments. Most are Lo-Fi, but some are cleaned up Hi-Fi versions from the master tapes. Great fun to play with!
This is so lo-fi it is glorious. Recording the sounds of this keyboard with a Nagra makes me laugh. Hi fidelity lo-fi. Thanx as always Hainbach.
IMHO this blows the mellotron out of the water! Sounds amazing!!
Nope
So this must be the secret behind "Slow 30's Room" by David Lynch and Dean Hurley 😮
It's the Big Band Beat Optigan disc. There's a demo of it on TH-cam
Was scrolling to see if anybody else had noticed this..
best music instruments best best best super excellent 70s style of music very very very touchy
Dude, that dual disc instrument you created at 8:36 🤯❤
Sparklehorse ❤ just in time when some new songs are being release.
Interesting device with nice sounds. Thanks for presenting to us 👍
That is amazing. What sounds it creates! It is both magical and enchanting! 😌❤️ Thank you for the video!
Thank You Heinbach!
I’ve been waist deep in the world of vintage musical and recording related technology for 40 years, so I was flabbergasted when I saw this device. It’s something I didn’t know existed.
The amount of stuff out there is mind-boggling, I am surprised every day
@@Hainbach I appreciate you bringing this surprise to us.
I love those sounds
Coolcoolcool. This would make for one heck of a superb basis for an emulation plugin instrument!
Fascinating. Thank you for this.
Wow, I can't believe that thing uses an analog and _optical_ floppy disc drive with jacketless discs! These are the kinds of floppies that the computer industry keeps forgetting to talk about because they're analog instead of digital, and optical instead of magnetic. Very interesting technology! At a glance it looks a bit like a clear vinyl phonographic disc. The relatively modern VF-50 disk, or video floppy 50, for lo-res camera still shots, is analog also; but magnetic and at least it has a jacket.
What an absolute beauty
Also your enjoyment of it was infections
Thank you for bringing this little gem to our attention. But mostly thank you for taking the lid off and showing us the detail of how it worked. The innovations in music making pre-digital or even pre micro electronics are just amazing. The cross over between film and music here is magic. I wonder if there is a way to fabricate new and exciting discs for that by inkjet printing on a clear film...
Sounds like a miracle. Pure genius!
Our family own a OPTIGAN that was sold in stores that came from the MATTEL COMPANY, the sounds that is used was identical to the real instruments, and TALENTMAKER, is basically the same, and just remodeled looking different. IF you own one hang on to that, they enhanced using electronic sound box. This means more sounds to use on the organ, it's now also a digital organ.
Glad to have you BACH.....
Oh, I recognise that guitar rhythm section off of so many film soundtracks!
Optical sound on film has always fascinated me, partly because it was eclipsed by laser tech in people’s mind for “optical disc”. But of course it’s completely analogue, and the thin beam of light’s brightness is directly analogous to a thin tape head measuring higher and lower magnetic flux.
Some sound-on-film systems used continuously-variable shades of grey filling the entire width just as with magnetic tape. But some used a direct picture of the waveform and only one shade of ink, because the width of the waveform modulated the received brightness of the slit of light just the same! And of course there’s an added cool factor in being able to visually distinguish the quiet and loud parts of a waveform on film!
I think these disks may be a format that Techmoan actually hasn't covered yet, quite astonishing ;-)
We've suggested it to him, but he felt it was a bit too niche for him.
Wow, this is very impressive, what a interesting concept !!!
"If it's not Kraftwerk I don't want to know what German band is!" - woah, so harsh! One might even say uncalled for ;D. Love this video!
Amazing find, this will keep you busy for a while!!!!
Holy Cow!…this machine is incredible!… an instrument created from this thing would be fantastic 😇🤞🙏😎
thanks for the discovery
Absolutely love it.
I haven't watched the whole video and I had no idea what this was, but what I do know is that is the body of a Magnus Chord Organ model 890, which is a reed organ and a drop dead fabulous instrument on its own. They gutted it and installed all those electronic guts this guy is demoing to us. A Magnus chord organ #890 is a full blown version of a toy chord organ, and retains the (wonderful) cheesy reed organ sound, but in a full blown floor standing model complete with a professional looking swell pedal and fabric cloth in front of your knees/shins that looks like it houses an expensive amp and 15" speaker, but it doesn't. 890 sold for $200, which was dirt cheap for a floor standing organ but a mind boggling price to pay for a toy organ that normally would cost $5 or $10 from the local five and dime store. Internally the 890 would be similar to your usual toy chord organ with a few important enhancements: it featured 8 chords (8 major, 8 minor) whereas a toy might feature only 4 or 5, and the "killer feature:" bass notes. That is an extremely rare feature on chord organs and transforms the 890 from a toy into a beast and I love it. Chord organs are targeted at kids and students. This optical disc organ was not, it must have been frightfully expensive and targeted at pro users, and yet look at that numbered foil above the keys, which are there so that a kid that can't read music could "play by number." The inventors of this organ lacked a little ambition when they didn't peel that off of there. You can see a model 890 on the "chord organ" Wikipedia page.
The Proper People need one of these and someone who really knows how to play it! Would go great with their videos.
instand portishead and silenthill vibes. love it!
Non-working one of these up on Reverb. So tempting.
What a great find! The keys sound at c.9min is ideal
This is one of the coolest things I have ever heard. I’m getting some Autechre vibes on some sounds. Fascinating technology. This must be pretty rare?
What a machine.. I'm talking about your Nagra, of course. DROOL
Yeah it is fantastic. And lightweight compared to the 4 series