While browsing a thrift store one day it caught my attention and I knew I had to have it. An old plastic reed organ in bright orange, with white legs and a very modest price tag. It was a Bontempi Hit Organ, an electric chord organ that was popular when I was a kid. But I had never owned one. Now was my chance.

The reed organ is a strange beast and it would be hard to sample all of it quirks correctly, so with this being my first real sampling project I settled on a simple instrument.

Each key has been sampled and looped individually. Since each reed had a slightly different tuning and character I couldn’t really get away with only sampling tritones. And the organ only has two octaves anyway, so it wasn’t too much of a hassle. There is no velocity information. It wouldn’t effect the tone, although attack time might be and the key noises would have a different character to them. I don’t think it would add much to the instrument though.

The key noises are four round robins for both pressing and releasing. You can hear a little bit of a squeek in there sometimes from the plastic keys rubbing against eachother and even some springs ringing for a bit. Not the gentle sophisticated key noises of a grand piano…

I cleaned up the tones to get rid of the ever-present fan noise, but also added a button so that it can be brought back in. Press the button and you will hear the fan slowly starting up and get to normal running speed. Press it again to have it wind back down.

All samples were captured from the organ using a Zoom H1n in my living room.

I hope this instrument can bring something nice to your palette of voices. Enjoy.

Contributors

Draugormr

Sampling and programming