A while ago, we had a Magnus Duette chord organ that was really dirty but otherwise in great condition. It looked like it had been stored indoors for many years, but then moved outside for just enough time to become blanketed in pine needles. Then, we got ahold of it.
Chord organs are less like electronic organs, and more like old-fashioned pump organs. Pump organs are these really cool retro-futuristic steampunk kind of instruments. When you push the foot pedals, the pump organ operates a bellows, and air is either pushed or pulled past a metal reed. Although pump organs pre-date electronic amplification, they’re really loud. Think about what an antique acoustic parlor guitar or a square piano sounds like, and you can imagine how cool it must have been to have a pump organ in your house. If you’re lucky, you can still find really great examples dating from the 19th century.
Once electricity became available, people began to explore improvements in the design of the pump organ. This was a problem that could be approached from a lot of angles. You could automate the pumping, or amplify the output, or convert the mechanical action into an electronic tone generator. Different manufacturers explored different aspects, and the lineage split. On one hand, companies like Wurlitzer spent the next several decades developing home organs whose sound was powered by air-blown reeds, then electronic oscillators and digital tone generators. On the other, companies like Magnus basically automated the pump action. They miniaturized the organ into a little plastic box powered by a tiny fan.
Instead of a full keyboard, the Magnus Duette has chord buttons for the left hand. Unlike most chord organs, however, the chord buttons are not literal buttons, but tiny piano keys. This makes the keyboard a lot more ergonomic to play than most chord organs. Judging from other teardown videos of Magnus chord organs, this also makes the instrument easier to clean. All of the keys come out together, attached by a long rod. It’s a little tricky to put them back, because you have to organize the keys so that they lay flat. But it’s not that hard to understand how the keys move, and it just takes a few seconds to fit everything back into place. This contrasts with chord buttons, which have a few more discrete parts and sometimes have delicate switch contacts that need to be treated gently.
The downside of the Magnus Duette—and all chord organs—is that operation requires a fan, which is very loud. This gives every recording a noise floor. Here, our strategy was essentially using a room mic. It’s positioned about 10” away from the instrument, and we are simultaneously close-miking the combo amp containing the drum machine output. (The amplifier is not miking the organ, which doesn’t have any outputs whatsoever.) Although we typically prefer to mic the Korg’s onboard speaker, we used the drum machine’s direct output into the combo amp. Otherwise, the drums were fully drowned out by the chord organ’s fan.
Another disadvantage is that the chord organ essentially has no dynamics. It has one volume, which is loud, but it’s not loud enough to really overcome the fan noise. So, it’s a little difficult to play something that isn’t pure cheese. Of course, creative limitations like these aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe there’s a genre out there that would really make this chord organ shine.
It would also be a cool project to try to mitigate the fan sound. Perhaps just moving the fan mechanism outside of the organ’s cabinet would make close-miking more practical. It would be fun to experiment, although it’s hard to know what the outcome would be. Maybe we’ll just be inventing the free reed organ from first principles. Maybe we’ll simply end up with the world’s bulkiest harmonica. But maybe the Magnus Duette is lightweight and sufficiently keyboard-like to make the effort worthwhile.
Taking it apart gave us another perspective on the tone generator, since the suction from the vacuum makes sound. Maybe if we had the right vacuum, a super-long hose, and a great close-mic placement, it could be possible to use the vacuum as a kind of stylus to play the organ’s air passages directly? Keyboards have been a pretty great interface since the 1200s or so, but maybe medieval organists would have gone a different direction if they just had access to a shopvac.
Either way, let us know if you ever try modding one of these—we want to hear it!