DAN MARSHALL: Hi. I’m Dan Marshall and the band is now me, and it’s RedNails.

PATRICK OGLE: And this is a Farfisa. That’s a --

DAN MARSHALL: A Farfisa Compact Combo, Italian transistorized organ at its finest. You know, it’s that ‘50s, ‘60s organ sound that you hear in every single pop song from those years. Well, I mean most of them anyway. Yeah, it’s not like a Hammond, it’s not like a Rhodes. I mean the Rhodes is actually an electric piano. It sounds like a piano that’s electrified. This is an organ but it’s got that -- it’s just piercing. It’s all transistorized. Actually here, I can show you it’s transitorization, so this is all just individual banks of transistors and if -- yeah it would be insane to have to repair this, which will happen someday. I have a second that’s all just for parts.

PATRICK OGLE: You bought two basically.

DAN MARSHALL: I bought both of these. Well, this belonged to one of my old bandmates, and I had been in a thrift store one day and saw another one and told me about it. So, he went and bought it and he actually took the guts out of the other one and put it in this one because it worked and took the guts out of this one and put them in the other one. So, if I ever have problems with it, I can take this in to Doc Electro here in Jeffersonville and have him diagnose it and then I’ll have the other one to say, “Well, hey. They don’t make these transistors anymore. I have all of them in and complete in another one.” And you actually have a little tuning thing here where you can change the tune of the entire organ if you really want to.

These are all your banks of transistors. There’s another four banks underneath these four. These are all your switches for all your different sounds: strings that don’t sound like strings, flutes that don’t sound like flutes.

PATRICK OGLE: And then?

DAN MARSHALL: And then this is -- this would be tuning. These three are the black keys which are the bass keys which do not work very well, and yeah. These are just amazing, amazing old pieces, and once you hear a Farfisa, you know it’s a Farfisa. Everything. Like I said, everything here doesn’t exactly sound like a piccolo or strings or an oboe but it does sound like a Farfisa.

PATRICK OGLE: And they’ve tried -- There are modeled versions of Farfisa out there but they just don’t quite --

DAN MARSHALL: It doesn’t have the warmth. It just doesn’t have it. I mean I can take the Moog over there, like I said earlier, and adjust it to get a very similar sound but it’s not the same. There’s a crunch, there’s a dirt, there’s just all of these angles to the actual Farfisa.

PATRICK OGLE: And this is something you probably don’t want to be taking out live.

DAN MARSHALL: I used to gig this. When with the old group, I gigged it because my keyboardist played bass on a Realistic and then played melodies on this, and it’s great. It has its downside in recording. When I’ve been recording my new record, I used it and the sounds are so piercing that they override everything. You have to really put it low in the mix when you’re actually mixing your songs or really all you can hear is Farfisa. It’s just kind of that powerful of a sound. If you can look into these into thrift stores for 20 or 30 bucks, if you ever pass a Farfisa in a thrift store, even if you don’t play Farfisas, go ahead and grab it because you can sell them on eBay for $300 or $400 [LAUGHS].