gwax's rumblings

Because indulging impulses and ridicu­los­ity are both things that are fun­da­men­tal to my being, I pur­chased, off of the craigslist­net­ter­tubes, an elec­tronic organ. Most specif­i­cally, I pur­chased, for my apart­ment place-thing, a used Conn 580 man­ual organ. There was a won­der­ful alcove in our apart­ment that was the per­fect size for an upright piano or sim­i­lar; I was brows­ing the inter­web­worknet­tubes and went to the craigslis­ter­net­ter­tube­web­works and hap­pened to find this won­der­ful organ for sale. To my advan­tage, the man I bought the organ from was nice enough to deliver it to our apart­ment. Of course, haul­ing the organ up two flights of stairs was quite a has­tle but it’s here now and it’s not mov­ing again for a very long time.

This organ, much like most other elec­tronic organs, is a com­plex device com­posed of gobs and gobs of ana­log elec­tron­ics. It would be accu­rate to describe the device as an early ana­log syn­the­sizer. Amongst the many other awe­some things about this organ, the top can be flipped up expos­ing the crazy mass of wires, oscil­la­tors and other cir­cuit crazi­ness. The num­ber of switches, but­tons, keys, and such on this organ is rather mind-boggling and I’m only start­ing to fig­ure out what half of the stuff does. That said, I’ve been pretty suc­cess­ful at toss­ing out some pretty awe­some sounds with­out know­ing what I’m doing.

With luck, hav­ing a key­board in the house with pro­vide me suf­fi­cient impe­tus to get around to relearn­ing how to play a key­board. I feel like I want to get back to know­ing how to play the piano (or, in this case, organ). Failing that, though, I’ve got the poten­tial to make some pretty fun sounds.