#transicord

We're playing a support slot at Electrowerkz in London next week. When you're the first band on it's not really appropriate to turn up with a whole van full of gear and props – we'll be lucky to get a quick soundcheck. So we were thinking about how we could simplify the setup, and Juju remembered the Transicord that I bought last year and haven't had time to play at all...

The what?

The Transicord was made by Farfisa back in the mid 60s. They were an Italian accordion manufacturer who were starting to feel threatened by the combo organ revolution. Accordions just weren't that cool any more. So they built a combo organ and crammed it into an accordion body to create the Transicord, one of the 20th Century's most curious and short-lived musical instruments.

Soon after releasing the Transicord to an uninterested European market, they realised that they could just forget about the accordion part and build a combo organ instead. The Farfisa Compact models (like the red one I play in Candy Says) and the "Basic" Transicord have almost exactly the same circuitry inside.

But mine is no basic model – it's a Transicord deLuxe. It was designed to appeal more to the electro-curious accordionist than the accordio-curious organist, so it has more traditional-sounding stops and (devastatingly) no multi-tone booster. The booster is the real fizzy, sharp sound that characterises the Compact range, so it's a shame not to have it.

The sound

After tuning it up and fiddling around with the sounds for a while, I realised that I was going to need to add something to make it sound like a Candy-worthy gig machine. Enter the OP-1. Bandcamp gave me one of these rather incredible little synths recently, and some of the effects and filters are amazing. Plugging the Transicord through the OP-1's DELAY, SPRING or CWO effects turns it from a cheesy café accordion into a psychedelic, atmospheric rocketship of an instrument. Like the Compact it also has a separate bass output, so I can put the button bass through a bass amp (via a fuzz pedal for extra fun) and the right hand keyboard through the OP-1 into a guitar amp. Now we're talking.

There are two slight problems with this setup, neither of which are going to stop me trying it out at the gig next week:

I have to learn how to play accordion bass. The second row of buttons is for root notes arranged in a circle of fifths, and the first row is a major third above the second (for passing notes and scales). The other four rows play major, minor, 7th, minor 7th and diminished chords based on the root note. Easy, eh?

It's heavier than a yak.

Wish me luck.