Words by Luke Murphy
Some history first. The Omnichord came out of Suzuki, the Japanese instrument company from Hamamatsu (no relation to the rally car people), in 1981. The idea was essentially an electric autoharp... press a chord button, sweep your finger along a metal strip they called the Sonic Strings, and out comes a harp-ish arpeggio in whatever chord you're holding. The first proper model, the OM-27, gave you 27 chords and six rhythm presets with names like Foxtrot and Slow Rock, and it wasn't aimed at musicians at all. Suzuki built it for singers and people who'd never learnt an instrument, because you physically cannot hit a wrong note on one. Everything comes out in the chord you're pressing, sounding completely in tune, even if you don't know your G from your C#.
People lapped it up. Around 40,000 units shipped in the first year, mostly to the US and UK. The reception was a bit odd though... nobody quite knew whether it was an instrument or a toy. It looked like an educational aid or a Fisher Price toy, it was marketed at beginners, and the serious synth world of 1981 had Jupiter-8s to worry about. But weirdly, actual musicians got hold of it almost immediately and started taking it seriously.
Dave Stewart was one of the first. 'Love Is a Stranger' came out in 1982, barely a year after the OM-27 launched. Stewart built the track from a Roland synth playing eighth notes and a drum machine pattern, then layered omnichord over the top for those electronic harp flourishes. He reckoned the track sounded eerily complete before Annie Lennox had even sung on it (she then did the vocal in one take, because of course she did). The result was one of Eurythmics' biggest hits.
Fast forward to 2001 and Gorillaz' 'Clint Eastwood'. Damon Albarn revealed in a 2023 Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe that the beat and riff of the whole song is the Rock 1 preset on an OM-300. He switches the thing on, pressed one button, and the intro to a massive global hit comes out of the built-in speaker. Even the stuttering drum fill is the omnichord's fill button. Albarn described the song as "complete hybrid, weird shit" and admitted he's spent the twenty years since buying electronic instruments hoping the first preset he touches would become a hit again. It hasn't.
And then there's 'Karma'. A stadium pop song on one of the biggest albums in the world, built on cascading omnichord and synth notes. Forty-one years after Suzuki shipped a plastic autoharp for people who couldn't play, it's the texture underneath a Taylor Swift chorus.
When Paul suggested we put an omnichord on the Brutalligators Christmas song in 2023, I was extremely dismissive. It's a plastic slab from 1981 with buttons on it. Why would we want that on a record? Which brings me back to Paul. He was right. The omnichord on our Christmas song lent itself perfectly to a dreary lo-fi sound that a proper synth would've been far too clean for. Rookie error on my part, and one I'd like to think I've learnt from.
It's slightly nuts that something that looks like it should be £20 at a car boot sale now goes for £600+ (enough of a market that Suzuki brought out a brand new model, the OM-108, in 2024). But I suppose that's the price you pay for an item as cool as the omnichord.
So why do I love it? Because it's completely non-serious. There's a level of whimsy baked into every part of it... the design, the sound, the fact that there's a Foxtrot button. Pull one out at a serious session and you're going to get some looks (deservedly, tbh). But there's also something in that sound that's drenched in a nostalgia I never actually had. The weird little beats, the thin, tinny chords, the reverb-soaked gliss when you sweep the strumplate... it all adds up to something you can't get from anything else.
