Beach House are a quintessential dream-pop band, they hail from Baltimore and a big part of their sound is their layering of keyboards, mostly vintage organs and string synths. The duo doesn’t seem too fussy about the gear they use, instead relying on old, cheap organs for their beats. A Pitchfork article describes their practice space: “Old tour set pieces and at least 20 vintage organs—they call them “grandma organs”—line one half of the large room.” They don’t talk about gear much in interviews and there are no pictures of the band recording, so it’s tough to figure out exactly which keyboards these “grandma organs” are. One keyboard Beach House are known to use heavily is the Yamaha PS-20 organ, which I’ll look at. Although organs are a big part of the Beach House sound, another huge factor that I won’t cover as much is their muted drum beats and guitarist Alex Scally’s work, which is mostly a clean Fender Strat played with a slide through a lot of reverb. Instead, I’ll focus on their synth-heavy songs to work out what makes that element of their sound so unique.

“We use a four-track for our beats, and a collection of organs we have acquired from various whereabouts. Alex plays a Stratocaster, and I have an old Yamaha keyboard that’s the same age as me.” – The Worlds In Our Heads, An Interview With Beach House

String Machines & Electric Organs

The two main types of keyboards favoured by Victoria Legrand are string machines and electric organs. String machines generally refer to inexpensive keyboards that were an attempt to produce cheap orchestral sounds by using slight delay to create the illusion of multiple sound sources. Although these keyboards failed to truly capture any orchestral accuracy, their lush, warm sound has a distinct character of it’s own. To learn more, check out this Brief History by Reverb.com.

Although electric organs can refer to a huge number of instruments, in this context I’m referring to cheaper portable keyboards from the 80s. They’re faker sounding than the Hammond organs popular in the 70s and despite the obvious differences in sound, the internal guts of string machines and organs are relatively similar; both sound like cheap yet charming imitations of their real counterparts.

The Yamaha PS-20 is an important part of the Beach House sound, it was even their main touring keyboard (up until 2015), and they would run it through a Line 6 Echo Park delay and Boss Reverb pedal. It has 10 different sounds and a sustain button that gives each note a long release time, perfect for flowing arpeggios. I have created a complete sampled remake of the Yamaha PS-20 which you can download here.