Discmaster Internet Archive

[Herminia Remmen]

Foryears Pea Hicks has carried a torch for the Optigan, a unique optical disc-powered keyboard from the '70s. His band with Rob Crow, Optiganally Yours, has released three albums. He's produced and sold sample sets of Optigan loops and keyboard sounds, and has even introduced a new Optigan disc player into the market. I've been fascinated with this instrument since I first saw one in 1987 while on tour, so I figured it'd be fun to chat with Pea on the phone and learn more.

Well, I first heard about it in an article in Keyboard Magazine. It must have been the mid-'80s when Bob Moog was writing a monthly column, at the time. He was discussing sampling, and he made a passing mention of the [Optigan Corporation] Optigan and the [Vako] Orchestron. There were no pictures of it or anything, so I had this image in my head of this weird keyboard that you put records in. I was fascinated with the concept, but my assumption, at the time, was that it was something rare and obscure, and that I would probably never see one. This was all before the internet. This was the first time I ever heard someone describe a keyboard as being "cheesy." I thought, "That's the keyboard for me. It must be something great."

I was 15 or 16 years old. I had been taking piano lessons, and I had gotten into synthesizers. We had a [Commodore] Amiga computer, so I was using that to make music. I was focused on trying to make them sound as good and professional as possible. Fast-forward to 1995: I was visiting a friend up in San Francisco, and we went to the Salvation Army. There was this ugly brown organ sitting there. I normally wouldn't have given it a second glance, but I happened to look at it and saw the word "Optigan." I thought, "Wait a minute. I know that name!" I had envisioned something about the size of a Casio keyboard, with maybe a small disc you put into a slot, but this was like a home organ. I turned it on, and it made this spooky, grainy, haunting sound.

Yeah, exactly. It sounded lo-fi. Bob Moog had said it was cheesy, but he didn't say the sound quality was terrible. It was only $50, and I thought, "I guess this'll fit in my car." The two friends I was road-tripping with were pretty pissed off. It wasn't until after I got it home that I discovered you could open the front panel, and that's where you could put the disc in, and there were six other discs in there. There was an owner's manual and a little flier that told you the names of some of the other discs. I was drooling over this list of discs going, "How in the world am I ever going to find any more?" I started my whole research project at the library, looking through old issues of Music Trades magazine. I had probably called every single number of every old organ store or repairman all up the West Coast. I realized that everybody knew about the Mellotron. That was a similar thing, but it was a known quantity. The Optigan was like the poor-man's Mellotron. I made it my own personal project to learn as much as possible about it. I found one guy who had a basic webpage with one page of not-too-detailed information.

My friend was like, "I can help you make a webpage for this." In the course of trying to find out information about Optigans, I managed to find a copy of the service manual. I found the names of various people who were in charge of technical service contacts. I tried tracking down some of those people, and I managed to get in touch with one or two who'd worked for the company. One big, important contact found me. After we put up the first version of the Optigan website, I got an email from Mike LeDoux. He said, "Hey, I was the guy who made all the discs. We should chat sometime." We ended up having a phone conversation. He knew everything about how this came about. He lived up the coast, not far from where the whole Optigan operation had been. The first time that I went to visit him, he said, "I still have the master tapes in my garage. You want to see them?"

We went out to his garage; there was this big metal cabinet, and there were 80 1/4-inch reel tapes. They were all color-coded, with detailed notes on them. He said, "If you'd gotten in touch with me a year ago, you would have seen a lot more. I had the original multitrack masters that went to the dump, and I had my whole archive of prototype discs and test discs." What he was showing me were the mixdown masters. He said, "These were going to be next, so it's a good thing I found you."

The nice thing was he'd made a photo essay. The Optigan was originally developed by Mattel, but it was never sold under the Mattel brand name. They formed a separate company called Optigan to make and sell this. In the mid-'60s, and they had this crazy genius inventor guy named Jack Ryan who was the main idea guy. In the early-to-mid-'60s, they had developed the talking Barbie, with these tiny plastic records inside, with two or three different phrases that she could say. You'd pull the string, and the needle fell into a random groove and played a phrase. They had been looking for other applications for this sound playback technology, and one of the ideas was to make a toy musical instrument. It didn't take long for them to stumble across this idea of using an optical soundtrack on a piece of film. They developed the Optigan and marketed it, but right around 1973 there was big trouble at Mattel and they had to unload some properties. The Optigan was one of the easiest for them to unload. It hadn't sold well, because the machines were unreliable and hard to service. They were also able to drop it very easily because it was a separate company; it wasn't technically a Mattel product.

That's why the discs are LP size. It was a custom piece of gear; a whole contraption with a Westrex mag stock playback machine. It was a real trick to make the loops in the first place, keep it all synchronized, and also to transfer the sound material onto the master disc. Closing the loop joints at the end, while minimizing thumps or other audio artifacts, was a whole process in and of itself. I have a whole technical paper that Mike wrote on that. From the point where the studio recording was in-hand to the point where the master disc was completed, for any given title it was about a month-long process. Full time work on one title. I'm not sure you know, but we've been making new Optigan discs for the past ten years.

The way that we do it is completely different from how they did it back then. It sucks that Mike passed away about a year or so before we figured out how to make new Optigan discs, because he'd be so fascinated. It's so easy to make seamless loop joints now! I remember talking to him, and when he was making the discs back in the early '70s, he knew that computers were coming online. He knew that digital memory was becoming cheaper, and that it was only going to be a matter of time before sound could be inexpensively stored digitally, and that you could do this with digital sound. He understood that samplers were just around the corner; but it wasn't there yet, so he was stuck in this hell dealing with all of this clunky technology. The frequency response on an Optigan disc tops out at about 5 kHz. That's the one fun thing about making the discs now.

That's oversimplifying it. But essentially what we're doing is feeding in a bunch of digital audio files, and on the other end what we get out is a very high resolution graphic image of the disc, which then has to be put on film. It's still a very expensive process. The vendor we use to output the discs, he's the only guy we've found who can do this to the degree of quality that's required. His primary business is with the military, doing blueprints. The files that we give him to generate a master copy of an Optigan disc are many times larger than all the other files he gets from clients. Generating one of our master discs ties up his machine for two hours. In order to get anywhere near the analog resolution that they were doing in the '70s with a Scully lathe with a light valve, these are rendered at a very high resolution, just to get a 5 kHz frequency response!

Yeah. We record the same way that you'd record anything. It's in the mastering phase that we really have to be aware of the limitations of the technology, and what we can and can't do. People who master for vinyl are doing a similar thing. They know which frequencies to emphasize, which to de-emphasize, and how much they can get away with. I've been mastering music for Optigan discs for ten years now, so I've got it down. I know how to master it where it sounds like crap on a computer, but when it ends up on an Optigan disc, it's going to sound okay.

At the time it was the only way to synchronize sound, because you had to keep the individual loops synchronized to each other so that they would all end up on the disc in the right place and be in sync. If they were off by even a little bit, you would hear it.

Exactly. At the time, that was the only way they had any hope of synchronizing. For any given disc, Mike would have to do several different tries at a master disc before everything was right. He got better at it. At this point, I've been mastering Optigan discs for twice as long as Mike was ever involved in this whole business. We're using totally different techniques, but I have twice the number of years under my belt dealing with this. The first recordings that they made were made around 1969. They got some musicians in the studio, and they said, "Play a bossa nova groove." They'd go around the circle of fifths, major chords, minor chords, and augmented chords. They didn't know what all they were going to be able to include on the

I think click tracks were not a totally new thing, but they were somewhat new, as far as the musicians were concerned. If there's a drummer, most of the time they're trying to follow the click, but they're doing their own thing. It was an important reference because dealing with analog tape, Mike had to find music loops that were as close to sync with that click track as possible. He had to listen carefully and say, "Okay, they played this chord eight times. This one is the closest to being in sync with the click track, so I'm going to edit that one out." Then it gets transferred to magnetic stock tape. It's a painstaking thing.

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