You Won't Believe The Sound of This Guitar 

The Doors in one instrument, incredible

My dad had two of those. He played solo in the late '70s and early '80s at supper clubs and the like (old school dinner and dancing kind of places) with a drum machine and base pedals. A one man four piece band. You want to hear it at it's best run the organ through a Leslie cabinet. The real trick is playing guitar and organ together without them being just mirrored, for instance playing background organ chords while fingerpicking a melody. My old man was a big Chet Atkins, Les Paul, Roy Clark fan so fancy fingering with a really clean sound was his style all along.

Sounds way better than what I was expecting! Impressive for the time.

You've just introduced me, a guitarist for over half my life, to an awesome new thing! And boy do I want one...

Most of the Guitorgans were built by MCI in the 70's using Japanese ES-335 copies, so seeing one built into a ES175 was a nice change. BTW, all those glitches you're experiencing with the controls and switches could be probably solved simply by cleaning them with Deoxit-5.

Nice to see a quality demo of one of these!

Ive been playing for decades, and ive never heard of such a guitar. This thing is awesome.

The sound you got out of the spinning speaker was amazing, i think it deserves it's own song.

4:35 THIS IS SO PERFECT FOR VIDEO GAMES I WANNA KNOW IF SOMEONE DID SO ALREADY

The guitar + organ combo at 5:21 I thought sounded especially nice

It sounds like something Hendrix or Jeff Beck might have used around 1968. Really incredible :)

If EVH had coincided at the time of electric organ popularity, the world would be totally different. Because, this is friggin perfect for tapping on.

EH makes the B9 pedal that makes your guitar sound like an organ. Hands down the best pedal I have ever had. No latancy, perfect. I use it in my solo gig for added texture. Get one.

I’m dying. If I could only show up to a gig with that and see my bandmates faces😂 Awesome video!

It’s so interesting because organ gets it’s sound from wind pipes pushing air and to get such a similar sound vibrating metal strings, all because the signal is sent to a pickup and the rest is magic I guess

what’s cool is you’re phrasing your playing like an organist would which, in my opinion, is how to approach any synthesized tone…if it’s a flute tone, play lines & phrases a flautist would play; I used to play with an old school piano player that reluctantly got a DX7 in the ‘80s and, no matter what setting was on, he played Bluesy, Boogie Woogie piano riffs which didn’t sound great on the sax or harmonica settings 😎

I live in Waco, and a friend of mine (who has passed) used to build those. He told me about them but this is the first time I've actually heard one played. He told me about how they modified the guitars, ran the wires, did board-level diagnostics, etc (he was an electronics teacher, so more of the tech part). Pretty cool.

VOX tried this in the 60s - today very rare collectors items. Nice to see another model that works great.

One of your best uploads yet. Weird, interesting and clean playing/ production. Your guitar skills seem to have reached new levels lately.

This thing is so cool. I feel like sounds coming outta that thing at 5:22 extended my lifespan by a few years

Fascinating guitorgan- something I never knew existed! It may be obsolete thanks to MIDI but the old becomes new and enthralling in this dystopian future we are all headed into. The Vibraphone and vibrato settings are enough to make this essential for church guitarists and Ray Manzarek fans. Thanks for another great episode!

Is it heavy?

When it seems like clickbait but it actually doesn't do the video justice. This thing is WILD. Also, if you're writing those little history blurbs in your videos, you're super good at it. It's hard to use brevity and still communicate everything in a context like this, pretty dope.

Great Video - I love weird unique instruments like this. Really interesting sounds coming out of that thing for certain.

I worked a lounge gig for 6 months with a guy who used one. It was a pretty cool experience, and for the time, it sounded amazing.

that's so awesome, I heard of these things but didn't knew about the frets. lately I thought about midi guitars and I had this exact idea for using your guitar like a keyboard or does something like this exist already?

The sticker over the Ibanez logo on the headstock… just gold.

Pretty rad! You could use that right hand for overhand fretting of unused strings. Or tapping, Also I was hoping to hear what happens when you over bend a string

man that thing looks like a ton of fun

I feel like I could just sit there for literally HOURS messing with this thing, looks like so much freakin fun lol.

One thing that is awesome with old electronics is that most of it is off the shelf thru-hole components that are easy to service and replace. Well if you have some basic knowledge of how electronics, a multi-meter and a soldering iron works that is. And yes you should have that in your home as that is an essential skill set to have especially when working with electric instruments years on end. Usually it's the capacitors that give out with age and need to be replaced or corrosion is messing with connectivity nothing that a bit of solder and flux can't fix.

honestly the combined guitar+organ sound is by far the best, wonder what that sounds with a little bit of gain!

It's been a long time since a guitar review has made me smile. I'm still grinning from ear to ear. Funny thing. I started playing guitar in '71 and I don't remember that guitar at all. Guess they didn't promote it heavily.

The guitorgan spinny speaker combo sounds sick as hell!

Personality, and soul, that what that thing is about. It's the vinyl record to the digital media, the analog recorder, to the digital high tech stuff. It's just a beautiful reminder of how warm old tech used to be.

This is cool. Maybe I should pay more attention. i love the weird stuff. I didn't know that this was a segment

"Sometimes limitations are nice" - absolutely love this.

I’ve been trying to find one of these for ages. So cool

I had an old CORT from Sears way back when that had 6 effects buttons on it. Pretty trippy guitar sounded wild.

Good to always be reminded of how awesome your dad is.. you need to interview him here from time-to-time. Would be cool to learn why he even decided to build a Leslie type thyng.

I think Electro-Harmonix offers a few pedals that will allow you to accomplish the same things.

I've seen a few of these broken open over the years, but never heard one! That thing sounds nuts!

I really dig the double guitar organ sound, best use for it as otherwise it just lets guitarists play the organ with a familiar interface, love that spinning speaker, with hybrid its a nitrous gospel carnival in box.

bro i wanted organ in my music and never learned i could’ve done this

Sounds way better than any midi guitar I’ve heard.

Thank you for showing me another guitar I need! I love the speaker your dad made ❤

4:00 so that's how the music for leisure suit Larry was made....

Python doesn’t even get an honorable mention?! I’m furious

That's so cool! I need to hear it through a death metal pedal

Another stellar vid by Sammy G! Some unusual infotainment, without pushing someone else's products. Thanks so much!

WOW! That's really amazing. Great find, man

I saw one at a small midwestern guitar store several years ago. They wanted around $400-500 for it. I still wonder if I should have gone ahead and bought it. Certainly a unique instrument! Nice demo video.

You can always count on Steve to bring us the weirdest shit 😂 I love it

Very interesting Sammi! Loved the HAmmond organ sound!

Wicked cool!! Looks like tons of fun!!

Your Dad needs a youtube channel. He builds the coolist stuff. SamuraiBuilder

Godwin made a very similar one in black - Godwin Organ (even the board in the back looks similar). Although it had a multitude of single toggle switches on the front control panel. It also had one of those power boxes. I picked one up in a pawn shop in my late teens as I thought it looked pretty cool - Although it didn't have the box included. This was pre-internet so there wasn't a lot of information about them. I noticed the frets were rather worn (from the organ playing), so promptly tried to replace them. Only to find that they were attached to wires under the fretboard LOL. It is as you said - if you don't have the power box they're basically useless. I ended up just making it into a regular semi acoustic which is still in the shed somewhere. Although with modern electronics, I was thinking of resurrecting it if I ever get the time. Nice find!

This was incredible. Honestly I expected a gimmick experimental type of deal but this was really good

Very cool!!! Thank You for sharing!!!

Vox made a guitar in the 60's that as a guitar/organ hybrid.

This kind of feels like what those midi guitars SHOULD'VE been

Amazing ! I didn't even know these existed. thanks for enlightening me on these! 😀👍

Really enjoyed that. Thanks, man.

Love how this was done 40 years ago and people today like to say that a MIDI guitar just technically isn't possible. Shows you how expansive people were on the technology when this guitar came out and how much farther we have come. Because now we do have MIDI guitars, Guitars with pedals in them, and probably more that I never have heard of before. This is really cool. I didn't believe the video at all at first. I thought this was a late April Fools joke. Thanks for sharing!

Nice job getting this old trooper out on the stage again! It's quite an accomplishment. I don't agree with you terming this guitar as weird. It's really quite an instructional masterpiece. Somebody could rewire this thing and it's go potential for just teaching so many combinations.

Wow. I've been interested in guitars for decades and have used guitar synths, but never ever knew about the guitar organ. Thank SG!

What an amazing piece of tech. Pretty amazing when you consider its age and the incredibly unusual array of sounds that it's capable of.

Guitorgan. They were out in the sixties. I knew a guy that wired his frets on his tele to a Hammond B3. It was amazing. He also put a switch on his guitar to control the speed of the Leslie.

We may not need a guitar with a polyphonic transistor organ inside it nowadays, but the idea of picking up midi from string on fret contacts sounds pretty much still relevant. Well at least for those who can't play the keyboard.

Dude, that is seriously mind blowing and I want one! You made it sound cool as heck!

That sounds pretty amazing for 70's tech!

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

Pre-etty cool. I could find uses for this. Thanks!

Very cool. Thanks for the post.

Literally a perfect video! Great content, so much fun

Cool vid! You always find the coolest stuff.

Fantastic video. Thanks.

I was hoping you to try out the keyboard solo for Highway Star. Interesting guitar and quality content as always.

I own three of the later peavey midibase (sic) & so the split fret thing is familiar. the peavey uses piezos to generate midi on-off, though, & strain gauges for string bending, so it articulates quite nicely. I have to keep the frets & strings very clean, though, & play carefully. chords & whatnot are good. the bass itself is an acquired taste, looks-wise, but holds its own, with two big active EMGs & a blend pot. I use the midi with its own volume pedal, & got rid of the adaptor box by hacking the internals of the bass's computer a bit. yep- you're on your own looking after these things, but they're a lot of fun & needn't be expensive or horrible base instruments- that ibanez gibson was a decent plank.

A friend of my grandfather had a Guitorgan. It was an external attachment that allowed him to chord the guitar and have organ chords come out of the speaker.

A magnificent concept which SHOULD have been more widely adopted in the decades before midi.

I LOVE the concept of these... I've known about them for years... but never found one I could buy within my budget.

I have a MIDI guitar system from the late 90s or early 2000s, and I haven't used it for a long time, but one of the downsides I remember is that there was a certain amount of lag, and if you played really fast it could become an issue. If this guitorgan DOESN'T do that, that could be an advantage.

Super cool guitar; will try to emulate these tones through a midi one day in the future.

How did I not know about this? In the 80's I was way into guitar tech. very cool, thanks for sharing it.

That 50/50 mix was RAD!

I would love to jam one of these. Great vid bud.

I had one in the 70s from Cintiolis in philadelphia. It was black, looked like a 335 and heavy with a thick cable that went into a volume pedal like contraption. After about a week it stopped working, no one could fix it and i returned it. I bought a leslie 145 for it also which was awesome for guitar as well. The hardest part was to play guitar parts that were convincing organ licks. As i remember the frets were not straight , they were seperated at each string and bending a string was not possible.

Awesome bit of kit

The sound that you had at the last bit of the video, reminded me to Pat metheny's are you going with me? Solo.

Awesome Man, Thanks,...

I like it more than most midi arrangements. The play is SO analog it keeps the soul of the human musician completely intact. Could listen to you play that thing all day long.

Super Cool and Fun! Liked.

The outro is a classic roller skating rink sound blast from the past.

Very cool. Robert Noyce created the monolith semiconductor when he was making an electronic organ at home. He etched the current paths in silicon, replacing wires on hybrid semiconductors created a year earlier, using acid and tooth picks. So music created silicone valley! Noyce started my company, Intel, and others in his career. My employer served the music industry in engineering panel components and invention of devices making Dolby and Surround Sound possible. Good stuff

It sounds amazing.

This is a great episode!

I had an earlier model that was built into a cherryburst Barney Kessel badged as a Norma underneath the Guitarorgan label. The frets were cut into 6 pieces, so no bending on notes. It was heavy, and sounded okay. Got rid of it sometime in the 80's.

When I was about 20, I saw one at a guitar store in some guy's basement (Sid Kliner, NJ). Sid demoed it. Having just started, I was not sure what to think of it... I've thought of it from time to time. Thanks for this vid. It sounds better than I thought. Kudos to your dad for the Leslie thing.

It could use a total recap and some basic electric engineering love: clean the switches and knobs with ipa or if they are really bad, first with contact cleaner and then with ipa, resolder the complete circuit with fresh soldering tin, and maybe do some rewiring. Changes are the draw bar that goes wild might come back to normal function and the instrument will sound fresh and crisp.