The Black Keys released “It Ain’t Over,” a new single off their upcoming album, Dropout Boogie. The duo consisting of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney will issue the new album via Nonesuch Records on May 13.
Carney tweeted about the new single, writing (edited for clarity):
New tune out now, “It Ain’t Over.” We built this song around an Optigan. Ralph Carney showed me way back in 1996 if you flipped the discs over they played in reverse. After the first two bars of this, I flip it into reverse. Thanks, uncle Ralph. Miss you.
The discs Carney referenced are integral to creating sound on an Optigan, which is a 1970s organ-like keyboard. The defunct www.optigan.com described the process, stating:
The Optigan was a kind of home organ made by the Optigan Corporation (a subsidiary of Mattel) in the early ’70s. It was set up like most home organs of the period- a small keyboard with buttons on the left for various chords, accompaniments and rhythms. At the time, all organs produced their sounds electrically or electronically with tubes or transistors. The Optigan was different in that its sounds were read off of LP-sized celluloid discs which contained the graphic waveforms of real instruments. These recordings were encoded in concentric looping rings using the same technology as film soundtracks. (Remember that sequence in Fantasia where the Soundtrack makes a cameo? Those squiggly lines are actually pretty close to what the real thing looks like.) As the film runs, a light is projected through the soundtrack and is picked up on the other side by a photoreceptor. The voltage is varied depending on how much light reaches the receptor, and after being amplified this voltage is converted into audible sound by the speakers. The word “Optigan” stands for “Optical Organ.”
Optigan discs have 57 rings of soundtrack – these provide recordings of real musicians playing riffs, chord patterns and other effects. (37 of the tracks are reserved for the keyboard sound itself- a different recording for each note.) So when you want to play a bossa nova, you don’t get those wimpy little pop-pop-chink-chink electronic sounds- you actually hear a live combo backing you up! The problem is that you only have a limited number of chords to choose from- C, D, E, F, G, A and Bb major, plus their parallel minor and diminished counterparts. (Actually, E and A major don’t really count, because for economic reasons (or maybe avant-garde musical reasons, depending on how optimistic you are) they decided to recycle the D diminished chord for E major and the G diminished chord for A major. I guess they felt that most of the notes matched anyway, so why waste the extra disc space? Consequently, playing anything in A or E major sounds really questionable at best.)
The Black Keys will support the release of Dropout Boogie on this year’s Dropout Boogie Tour. Watch a visualizer for “It Ain’t Over” below:
