Stefan Stenzel's New iOptigan App For iOS Recreates The Famous Lo-Fi Sound From the Optigan Organ From 1971

If you talk about Stefan Stenzel, Synthesizer enthusiasts especially from Germany, hear the bells. Known as main developer of the Waldorf Music company, started today a second workplace beside the big Waldorf projects here he publish apps under his company name. He released today his first music app with the name iOptigan that emulates the sound character from the Optigan organ from the 1970.

Optigan stands here for optical organ and was an electronic keyboard instrument designed specially for the consumer market. The complete instrument was based on pre-recorded optical soundtracks and had a similar concept as the Mellotron. The difference was that the Optigan used a motion picture optical soundtrack technology and the Mellotron magnetic tape. It doesn’t use internal generated sounds like a Synthesizer but used recordings of actual musical instruments. That had the consequence that the Optigan had a quite poor tonal quality due of this lo-fi sound technology. Many experts described this different sounding instrument as a scaled-down and more affordable version of an electronic organ.

With this new app, Stefan Stenzel released an app that emulates carefully this famous lo-fi sound, included several best-known songs (additional are available via an in-app-purchase) and added on top a nice spring reverb that you can also find in the hardware instrument. The app comes with all actual connection possibilities (Audiobus 3, Inter-App-Audio, MIDI In/Out, MIDI File import…) but unfortunately without an AUv3 version. If you love organ sounds, this new app is possible a must have for you.

The Optigan, short for Optical Organ, was a chord organ from the early 1970’s. It is remembered today for its unique system of sound reproduction using optical discs. These LP-sized film discs were optically encoded with 57 concentric tracks, which contained loops of musical combos playing chord patterns in different styles. Each disc contained a specific style of music (Bossa Nova, Big Band etc) which the user could control by pressing the chord buttons. Changing the discs was as simple as putting a new record on your turntable. Think of it as the 1971 version of GarageBand. Despite this novel technology, the scratchy sound of the Optigan left a lot to be desired.

The iOptigan we present here truthfully recreates that lo-fi sound. 25 of the original 40 discs are included, the remaining 15 can be purchased individually or all together in the Complete Pak.