Viva Italia...

Yesterday, one of my many Craigslist search spiders turned up this little gem, a Melo-Sonic 350 combo organ (with drum machine, natch!) I’d never heard of this particular instrument, but that’s never stopped me before, and the early bird gets the worm, as far as Craigslist postings for cheap instruments go.

As luck would have it, the dude wrote me back straight away, and he only lived like 4 blocks from here, so I hopped in the CReagle and went over to grab this mythical Melo-Sonic. It’s a tiny little combo organ with integral legs. Once I got it home, I went a-googlin’ to see what was known about this thing. Turns out, the “Made In The United States” sticker on the bottom is somewhat misleading, as the boards inside come from (and it says so right on ’em) Italy.

The Whippany Electronics Company in New Jersey made (perhaps “assembled” would be a better word) combo organs throughout the 60s and early 70s for several brand names, including Realistic, Rockland, Clark, and our Melo-Sonic. They’re all the same organ and really there are only two models: one with a drum machine, and one without. This company sourced boards from Italy (where a thing or two is known about making a combo organ) and built the enclosures here, in their New Jersey factory.

Unfortunately, the Italian company that made these boards is not Farfisa. The guy selling this to me said “yeah, it’s like the Poor Man’s Farfisa!” I don’t want to disagree with his detective work or anything, but it’d have to be a really, really poor man. Instead of 12 divide-down oscillators like every other solid state organ, it only has four, with each oscillator serving three notes in the octave. This makes certain chords and inversions impossible to play, and results in some very strange voicing. To add injury to insult, it is in need of re-capping (it is, after all, over 40 years old) and some of the notes bend a bit when you strike ’em.

So, being me, I took the couple hours necessary to do a full multi-sample, so I can pack this thing up and put it in The Land Of Unused Instruments. I have added a Live Set to the “Free Shit” page (link on the right) that contains an Instrument Rack with Samplers for every voice in the organ, plus the bottom octave monophonic synth bass (which is, by far, the best feature). I’ve also cloned the knob functionality, including the “Vibrato” feature (which is, of course, actually tremolo.) For some strange reason, the designers chose 7Hz exactly as their tremolo speed, which is a punk-rock clip for organ trem. Maybe they were doing amphetamines or something. Anyhow, I’ve duplicated that as well.

Also included in the set is a Drum Rack containing every drum sound the little fucker can make. The drum loops are actually not terrible for this sort of donka-donka drum machine, but I didn’t bother to sample them entire, as most of their character comes from the unpredictable nature of the result, and I can’t duplicate that with a loop.

Anyhow, this is the sort of sample set that you need when you need it, and the rest of the time you don’t need it. Everything is parted out inside, so you can, if you so desire, just grab the samples folder out of the project and make a set for your sampler of choice. As always, hitting the Donate button is appreciated but in no way required.