In 1971, toy giant Mattel tried to conquer the living room with an organ that read sound off 12-inch clear film discs using a tubular lightbulb and solar cells. They called it the Optigan. Borrowed straight from 35mm movie projectors, those 57 concentric optical tracks were pressed against internal felt pads that ground dust and scratches into the celluloid with every spin. It was noisy, mechanically fragile, and commercially doomed. Naturally, producers like Jon Brion, Fiona Apple, and Tom Waits fell in love with it.
When Optigan archivist Pea Hicks and former Waldorf CTO Stefan Stenzel brought the instrument to iOS on Halloween 2017 as iOptigan, we missed covering it here on ANR. Nearly nine years later, the duo—operating under Stenzel’s DSP Bricks banner—have finally released the official Optigan Plugin for desktop DAWs.
57 Concentric Tracks and a 1971 Wiring Quirk
Where vintage sample libraries like M-Tron Pro treat the Optigan as a chromatic sound source, the actual machine worked more like an early-70s arranger workstation with training wheels. Your right hand played 37 chromatic scale tracks (mostly thin organs, vibes, or winds), five rocker switches fired off percussion fills or intros, and 21 left-hand buttons triggered pre-recorded rhythm combos playing Bossa Nova, Big Band, or Polka loops.
Do the math on those numbers and you hit Mattel’s wildest engineering shortcut. Thirty-seven scale notes plus five effect switches left only 15 optical tracks on the disc for 21 chord buttons. Rather than redesign the optics, the original engineers wired all seven diminished buttons—plus A major and E major—to share the same pool of just three tracks. Press F dim or D dim, and you get the exact same audio loop.
Stenzel didn’t sanitize that flaw in the Optigan Plugin. He kept the original track routing intact and candidly notes in the manual that those buttons are “a bit useless.” That same refusal to polish away history runs through the entire 120 MB installer, which packs all 40 original commercial discs, 15 alternate disc revisions, and three unreleased prototype discs. Much like cassette-based loop instruments such as Portatron 2.0, the appeal here is the physical friction: motor hum, surface crackle, an optical metronome, and the ability to flip any disc upside down so every loop plays backward.
Signalsmith Flex Pitch and Dual-Button Chord Detection
On hardware, a single motor drove the disc. Speeding up a sluggish drum groove meant pitching the entire band sharp. Stenzel—the former Waldorf CEO and CTO whose original Streichfett and wavetable DSP code still echoes in modern hardware like the Waldorf Crema—solved this with Flex Mode. Powered by the Signalsmith Stretch DSP library, Flex Mode decouples BPM from pitch so loops lock to host tempo without transposing. There is a minor computational catch: changing DAW tempo or cent tuning with Flex active triggers a background recalculation across all 57 tracks simultaneously.
To work around the rigid triad buttons—and actually capture performances inside a DAW—the plugin sends and receives MIDI notes for all 37 scale tones, 21 chord buttons, and five FX switches. You can map everything across a standard 61-key controller (G#0 to B5), switch to the hardware Panoptigon standard (which maps D1–E2 directly to the 15 unique chord tracks rather than the redundant buttons), or trigger chords and FX from your computer keyboard (QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, or note-letter layouts) and record the resulting MIDI output straight to a DAW track. A toggleable Radio Mode lets chord buttons latch like vintage car-radio pushbuttons instead of requiring a continuous hold, while Chord Detection II analyses incoming MIDI voicings—play a Cmaj7, and the engine automatically mashes the C major and E minor buttons together just like a seasoned hardware player.
Even the audio routing respects the original schematic. Hardware Optigans only fed the right-hand scale tones through the internal spring reverb, hard-panning chords, effects, and wet reverb to the left channel while dry organ sat on the right. Because that split is disorienting on studio monitors, a three-way Stereo Width switch lets you toggle between Strict 1971 wiring, a Relaxed stereo spread, or summed Mono. And don’t forget the virtual Motor Drive switch on the front panel: flip it off, or configure Pitch Bend Down to stop the motor, and the instrument cuts out just like pulling power on the disc drive.
Pricing and Availability
The Optigan Plugin is available now from DSP Bricks and Optigan.com for $49 / €49.
It runs as a VST3, AU, and AAX plugin or standalone app on macOS (10.13 or newer, native Apple Silicon) and Windows 10/11, requiring just 200 MB of disk space. The perpetual license includes two activations, and a trial download is available immediately with no credit card required.
