MIKE CONROY: So yeah, I’m Mike Conroy, and this is a Guitorgan, and [STRUMS A CHORD ON THE GUITORGAN] unfortunately not complete working order but still it’s making a lot of noise.

PATRICK OGLE: So tell me what it is, what a Guitorgan is.

MIKE CONROY: It is a -- This is a guitar with -- and you can kind of hear it scream a little bit -- It has an organ built inside of it to the extent that these are the stops, the different sounds that your typical organ would have, [STRUMS THE CHORD ON THE GUITORGAN], and then the keys are basically when the string touches the fret. If you can get a close-up on the frets, you can see that they are segmented, so there’s six pieces to each fret, and each one has just has a wire going through it, so this neck is hollow and completely filled with copper wire going to an enormous circuit board -- there it is -- that’s the case that’s why every guitorgan you’ll see is a hollow body because they use the bodies to house all the circuitry.

[MIKE CONROY PLAYING THE GUITORGAN]

PATRICK OGLE: I have another question: Why? [LAUGHING]

MIKE CONROY: Why? [LAUGHING] So you could play an organ and a guitar at the same time, and the idea is when the string touches the fret, it touches off so like this would actually be the equivalent of pushing down an A string or an A key on an organ. So, you don’t even have to fret it or strum it. You just take the frets down and it keys of your [STRUMS CHORDS ON THE GUITORGAN].

Now, the problem is is that the circuitry is very, as you can tell, it’s kind of intermittent. The circuitry is very delicate and I don’t think they had it quite down.

PATRICK OGLE: When were these made?

MIKE CONROY: I think it was in the like early to mid ‘70s, and there were not a whole lot of them. There’s -- It caught me that these were, the ones that I have are just called Musitronics and they outfitted Univox guitars. So the guitar was made first. They bought a bunch of them, cut out the backs, dug them out, and stuck in all this circuitry.

[MIKE CONROY PLAYING THE GUITORGAN]

PATRICK OGLE: So, I’m feeling that sound is the guitorgan.

MIKE CONROY: Yeah. This is the actual organ sound. At least you can tell there’s something wrong with it, but that’s kind of the idea.

[MIKE CONROY PLAYING THE GUITORGAN]

MIKE CONROY: And that’s -- And these are just different tones.

[INDISCERNIBLE] I have a couple of more but what I did was I bought these with the intentions of using the parts to help fix that one. So, you can kind of see this one is just -- I got them like this. I didn’t destroy them, but this is sort of what the inside of these things look like, and as you can imagine this is how you tune each knob.

PATRICK OGLE: These are like -- This is like not in style.

MIKE CONROY: Yeah. This is just insane like straight [OVERLAPPING]

PATRICK OGLE: Basically if somebody decided to do this today, it would be on a chip the size of your finger.

MIKE CONROY: Oh, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. This just kind of the -- your precursor to the MIDI guitars.