Malmsjö A 200 / Viscount S Dakota

Finally I made it! I just found out a little more about my Unknown Malmsjö Combo Organ. God knows I have been searching for info on it, thought i tried every combination on words that could match on Google. The label on it says Malmsjö but I was pretty sure it was a rebranded Viscount so anything from the obvious "Viscount Combo Organ" to specific parts such as the "Synth Effect" has been Googled with no success. But today I found this post on Infrequent Sound a Belarusian blogg which seems to be about odd gear of any kind.

So today I found out it was called S.Dakota (not a big guess that the S stands for South). Tried to search a little more on Google after finding out. But all I found was some Italian classified ads. Guess I'll get in touch with the guys at Infrequent Sound at first. And then if you as a reader by any chance has some info on the organ don't hesitate to contact me.

During Christmas I took the opportunity to open it up to get rid of some of the noise and tune it properly.  I got it in pretty good shape although I really don't think the synth-part is working as it should.

Here's some photos of the different parts on the outside and inside.

The sound of - The unknown Malmsjö combo organ!

Last week I got me a new organ again (you can read about how I got it here). This time a combo organ with synth part by a Swedish company called Malmsjö. However the organ might actually be a re branded Viscount, more about that in a later post.

The organ in itself sounds pretty much like an ordinary but quite good Italian organ. I haven't tried to many Italian ones but the Piano sounds are not far from but better than for example the GEM Instapiano. The organ sounds are a bit behind my favorite Philicordas but the bass and percussive sounds have quite some punch. I made a brief demo of the organ parts of it:


The most interesting part of it is the Synthesizer found on the bottom right of the organ called "Synth Effect". Actually it works mostly as some kind of filter for the piano (incl. spinett and clavi cord) sounds. With High Freq, Low Freq and Mid Freq buttons. Two simple envelopes ( kind of soft / hard attack) and a selector for square ore sine wave for the filter. Apart from these on/off selectors there are four sliders for Frequency, Amplitude, Response and Intensity.

To be honest though, whatever I do with the different knobs not much seems to happen. Might bee that all functions are not 100% working but since I haven't found any other demos or examples it's hard to tell. The Intensity slider however goes pretty fast into feedback on most settings and that might indicate that not everything is as it should bee.

I made a demo of this part as well:



As you can hear it's no Mini Moog that you get in the bargain with the combo organ, but it's a quite nice addition since you can mix the sounds freely and you also get a separate output for the Piano/Synth part.

I'm still trying to find out what the model is called and maybe if I find out more I'll be able to get more out of it.

I'll get back with some detailed photos to help trace it in a later post:

The unknown Malmsjö combo organ

There are quite a lot of used organs in the classified ads in Sweden. And normally I do not pick up a new one if it's too far away from home. However I look for organs all over the country and check them out a little extra if it seems to be something interesting.

When I discovered my latest addition to the collection it first didn't seem to be something special. But I have been curios about Malmsjö since the Swedish organist Nils Dacke uses them and this was a combo, which is always a bit more interesting. Therefore I asked for some more pictures and one of the pictures i received was this one:

I think you can see why it caught my interest the "Synth Effect" part. Was this actually a swedish combo organ with a built in synth? I starterd searching for information on the piece but found nothing, really nothing, on Google or elsewhere. It was really cheap (about $80) but located 350 km from my home, and not in a direction i normally travel so it was a bit to hard to pick it up and eventually I simply let it be.

But about two weeks ago the seller contacted me again and said the organ still hadn´t found a new owner. So I started looking for alternatives for the transport. Finally I put out a question on Facebook if anyone was going to do the trip from Värmland to anywhere near my hometown. And it worked, a friend of a friend was going to do the trip in just a week and was kind i enough to help me with the transport. And yesterday it arrived in my studio. I was quite eager to try it out, to see if there really was a synth and if so how it sounded.

At first I couldn't figure out how to get any of the synth effect features working. But finally I found out that the Piano part was the basis of the synthesis. And the synth effect was practically a kind of filter for the piano sounds. I guess you could call it a synth, but it's not quite a built in Moog or Arp.

More about the organ and it's sounds here