There were several instruments related to the Optigan, such as the Vako Orchestron and the Chilton TalentMaker. The latter was meant to improve the sound quality of the Optigan and includes extra chord buttons that the Optigan had been missing. The main optical discs that I’ll look at are Classic Guitar for the Optigan and Guitar in 4/4 for the TalentMaker. Note that I’m using samples of these discs. Here’s where to get samples:

GForce M-Tron Pro / Optitron Expansion: a very exhaustive selection of Optigan samples but missing TalentMaker samples. M-Tron Pro comes with the Classic Guitar samples a the Optitron expansion has some other great stuff.

Optigan.com: An extensive selection of raw samples. Pricey but there’s some really rare stuff, including the elusive TalentMaker samples.

“It’s funny because you were talking about my grandfather inventing that keyboard, Jon has some old keyboards. My father, who is the son-in-law of my grandfather, took over his keyboard shop and he started to sell electronic synthesizers and organs and he had this very weird synthesizer called The Talentmaker. And I hadn’t heard or seen one in 30 years. And when I went to see Jon he had this. So when you hear this very sad guitar that we use a lot [in the film] that’s [The Talentmaker]. So you had the nostalgia of my grandfather’s shop. So it was great to collaborate with him.” – Michel Gondry (director of Eternal Sunshine)

Phone Call (cont.)

Now I’ll show how the TalentMaker and Optigan samples were used to create Phone Call, note that the song uses the TalentMaker samples but I’ll also show how to use the Optigan samples from GForce M-Tron Pro too, as these are a little easier to get hold of. Firstly the TalentMaker ‘Guitar in 4/4’ samples: