One evening, many years ago, Ed Sullivan's TV show featured a monkey that played an electric organ. The instrument used by the cute little guy was about 2 feet square, was painted white and had a number of rather large buttons on top. By pushing these buttons, the monkey could actually produce notes which sounded very much like a full sized electric organ and, since he had learned the proper sequence of button pushes, he managed to play a simple but familiar tune. I had always wanted to own an electric organ. I concluded that if an instrument that small could sound so good when played by a monkey, I ought to be able to construct something similar, myself, and learn to play it even better than the monkey did.
Vacuum tubes were still in vogue, at the time, and electronic parts and hardware were quite readily available to the home constructor. I decided to use a number of doorbell buttons for a keyboard. I mounted these on the sloping front panel of a black wrinkle finished metal cabinet, about 2 feet wide, a foot deep and 4 inches high. At the left end of the cabinet's top I drilled numerous holes to provide a grill through which the sound from a speaker mounted inside the cabinet could be heard. I studied a number of articles and books describing various ways to produce music electronically and came up with a fairly simple circuit which I felt would produce some pleasant music.
The finished project sounded somewhat like a cross between a Hammond Organ and a Novachord. It boasted two chromatic octaves and had three stops for tonal variations as well as a pleasant vibrato which could be switched either on or off.
I had played violin in my High School Orchestra and so I could read the notes of the treble clef. It wasn't long before I was doing a fairly good job of plunking away at relatively simple tunes. Unfortunately, the organ could only produce one note at a time. Consequently, it wasn't possible to play a melody with a chord accompaniment. Nevertheless it was a fun type device to use and visitors would enjoy sitting down at the tiny console to see what sort of music they could come up with. I wrote an illustrated construction article showing how one might build a duplicate of the organ. The article was published in the old Ziff Davis magazine, ELECTRONICS WORLD.
This was back in the days before 'keyboards' had ever been thought of. One of the popular small instruments of the era was the relatively inexpensive portable Chord Organ. The better ones usually sold for alittle under a hundred dollars. They could either sit on a table or stand on their own screw-in wooden legs. The keyboard consisted of two sections. On the right half were the white keys from an accordion.This is where you played the melody. At the left were an accordion's black chord buttons. Accordion reeds were placed inside the case. They were activated by air produced by a small electric pump. In effect, you had an accordion that you didn't have to squeeze by hand. Instead, you merely sat down in front of the small organ's console, threw the a.c. switch and started to make music. Needless to say, after playing my little one note electronic organ for a few months, these Chord Organs looked mighty tempting.
One day I received a letter from a fellow in Milwaukee whose boss imported Chord Organs. Not being too impressed with the reedy sound quality produced by these units, he was looking into the possibility of manufacturing an electronic chord organ. He wanted his employee to experiment with something similar to the one I had written up in ELECTRONICS WORLD. The fellow asked all sorts of technical questions and was looking for suggestions on how to go about building an electronic unit. I told him that the simplest thing for him to do would be to trade one of his boss's chord organs for the one I had built and then he could check out my orginal right there in Milwaukee. Needless to say, it wasn't long before I had a REAL Chord Organ and he had my electronic device to experiment with. At the time, there were many music books written especially for the popular little Chord Organs. I immediately purchased several of these books and in no time I was able to make what sounded like pretty good music using only one finger of my right hand to play the melody and one finger of my left hand to pick out the appropriate chords by punching the black buttons.
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