@@ChruthFabianYou ain’t kidding. I had the GR 700 which I could never get ready for live performance..however, many pros did. But I am sure the Roland company had their techs set it up. I have the GR55 now and it was a bit of work to set up but I use it for live performances weekly.
Vox should bring back the guitars they made in the 60's. Ultrasonic, Teardrop, Phantom, etc. People are killing each other trying to get their hands on those guitars...it would be smart to start making them again. Innovative, yet classic!
Just amazing to actually see and hear Dick Denney! He was a genius inventor. He invented the classic Vox AC15 and AC30 guitar amps, the Vox fuzz pedal the "Tone Bender" and the Vox guitar organ you see here. He was a friend of both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and gave Paul McCartney the Vox Tone Bender you hear on the Beatles record "Rubber Soul." It's too bad the original Vox company went out of business after 1967 when both Denny and owner Tom Jennings left the company, but their products live on.
Well, no, he didn’t but he was very adept at it. And when that commercial came out no one was aware tapping had been going on for a long time. Jazzers didn’t do it or rockers at the time which is why it seemed new.
@@valley_robot OMG…well I am not surprised. Musicians, hmmmm. That name applies to someone who continues to hoan his craft, to challenge themself….it also applies to someone who plays two chords badly.
@@syn707 the theramin is from 1928, a VCO or voltage controlled oscillator, pitch and volume controlled by proximity to the the two antenna, it's a synthesiser
The patent for the Guitorgan was 1st registered in 1954 by a man from Newark NJ. I tried to file a similar patent in the late 1970s and it cost me $500 to find that out . Hahaahaaahahha!
pjmuck they have resistors inside the neck, and as the guy said the strings complete a circuit when they touch the frets, the lower the note the more resistors in its way and the higher the resistance, so each note has its very own distinct resistance and that's how it tracks so well
@@morbidmanmusic not for a large scale selling guitar, the amount of routing and soldering you have to do would make it way too expensive Remember, gibson sell their basic guitar for a thousand and they have shitty hardware these days…
Yeah I'm pretty sure that whoever built the first stringed instrument with a fingerboard also invented tapping. EVH just popularized it and brought it to the hard rock/metal world.
Mid or late 70's i ran into a guitar player on the holiday inn circuit. He had a Gibson 335 model re-worked to a Organ guitar. Had the Leslie cabinet and his guitar amp and bass pedals. Perfect B-3 sound. After hours he let me play it. Very Heavy ! & very complicated circuits. A blast to play tho
I bought a wah pedal at a pawn shop, and took it home and took back off of it, the board said Thomas organ company on the green board, it was made in sixties, later i learned that it was one of the very first wah wah pedals ever made
Most of the Vox amps in the US were made by the Thomas Organ Company. Early ones, before 1965, came from England. I bought a Vox Cambridge Reverb amp in mid-‘66 that was a Thomas product. At the end of 1966, I got a Vox Phantom XII guitar that was made by the Eko guitar company in Italy. Most of the Vox guitars that made it to the US were Italian.
It has just been pointed out to me that his name is actually Dick Denney. I knew him when I was a teenager and even bought an amp from him once, but the host got it wrong and caused me to have a brain fart. Thanks. :) Sorry to be such a pain in the arse...
When I was very young I saw what was either a white Phantom VI or a copy (this was around 1975ish) hanging behind the counter of the musical instrument store. I never tried it out, but I never forgot it. It really enchanted me.
I knew a guy that had one of those back in the day, and there’s a good reason they never caught on. EDIT: And I had (still have) a Vox Phantom and I never understood why they didn’t catch on.
The Casio DG20 digital guitar does a similar thing in terms of infinite sustain and two types of organ on it. However the Casio DG20 is both a midi controller and early digital guitar, like having a Casio keyboard activated by a guitar that's basically fretless with plastic strings. Whilst this vox organ guitar is totally unique it can do organs, flute like sounds, arpeggiator rapid fire, and normal guitar sounds
0:55 interestingly, i remember dan castellaneta describing taking "D'oh!" and shortening it down to how it came known to be, but he adopted it from an older laurel & hardy actor, i didnt know it was universally known and used as this is exactly how i heard dan castellanetta express how it originally sounded
Today's mass media is aimed at the lowest common denominator viewer. In today's highly complex world, specialized devices like this one would go way over the heads of most viewers. That's why internet streaming sites like RU-vid exist. If you are a drummer, guitarist or whatever, there's a RU-vid channel available for each instrument. That's where they show us all the myriad of "toys" and studio magic used to create unique sounds. Television can never return to its glory days. They are over and done with. The Learning channel has nothing educational, the History Channel is effectively useless, and MTV has little to do with music. RU-vid and other streaming services have killed whatever good material was left on TV. Podcasts have also decimated whatever audience TV had left. It's still a mystery to me why television still exists at all.
The way the organ part of this guitar works is not really how tapping works in the Van Halen sense. That said, Eddie was still not the first, but he probably came up with the idea on his own. It's the sort of thing that anyone playing around with an electric guitar and a relatively high-gain might stumble onto.
Tapping goes back centuries. Eddie, Steve Hackett, etc. (who was there before Eddie), they all used it but it was an established technique long before they came along. @@wbfaulk
Dick Denney was a great innovator, this guitar was way ahead of its time and the great thing here is you get the keyboard like 'infinite' notes which you can't get on a guitar without some sort of feedback device like an E Bow or a mega distortion. Jimmy Webster mad the 'two handed tapping' method famous in the 50's demoing Gretsch guitars.
There's no need to replicate this. There are things like piezo pickups for every individual string, with direct to midi output etc. Very niche, but replicating something like this would be pointless because we simply have better tech to achieve same goal - turn guitar into synth.
I can't think of any that were done like this. This is a ridiculously complicated device that was horrendously expensive to make. It wasn't long before people came up with much simpler ways to do it.
There was an Italian-made guitar/organ in the early ‘70s called a Godwin. Had abouut a million switches on it. In the ‘60s and ‘70s a guy from Waco, TX, named Bob Murrell (I think) had something called a Guitorgan. The early ones had the tone generators and circuitry built into Japanese Gibson Barney Kessel copies, because they had full body depth and all the organ electronics would fit inside. Later ones were built into Japanese ES-345 copies. They made one called a B-300, which they claimed sounded like a Hammond B-3 organ. All these things had wired frets to trigger the organ sounds. I think the Guitorgan predated both the Vox and the Godwin, but I’m not 100% sure about that. All of them definitely predated the Casio.
it's not midi but direct to the jack, to the amplifier. they already have the technology 50 years ago. What else are they hiding from us. Now they sell us crappy clones of this 50 year old technology.
The way Americans spoke English sixty years ago is completely different from the Contemporary American English. I enjoy listening to these people because they speak correct English
I have one but I am needing a power supply box. And do they weigh a ton! Wouldn't want to play a whole concert with one. They actually came out before 1967, in the U.K.
I think your all missing the point here, I've seen and played one of these before. The fret bored is the keyboard, the whole purpose is that you can play a keyboard part but you can also play guitar at once
