Tame Impala's singer has made a synth musical instrument for songwriters

The songwriter and creative powerhouse behind Tame Impala, Kevin Parker, has veered off in a slightly surprising direction, by making his own musical instrument.

Orchid comes from Telepathic Instruments. And while you might assume this means it’s all a bit of a shallow tie-in, Parker is one of the co-founders of the company, which was announced earlier this year.

Let’s get to the good stuff, though, because an Orchid is likely to break out of music gear circles and into general desirability in the way few other than Teenage Engineering can manage.

The Orchid is dubbed an “ideas factory". It’s a keyboard with a multiple synthesiser engines built in, and just a single octave’s worth of keys. That’s 12 keys total, for those who never made it past Grade 1 Music Theory.

You’re not going to learn to play piano on a Telepathic Instruments Orchid, then, but that’s kinda the point. You press the keyboard key to get the note you’re after, and the buttons on the left fire off different chord voicings of that note.

Press down more of those left-side buttons and you’ll hear chords with more complicated harmonic content — as the company’s demo video shows, things can get pretty jazzy or discordant if that’s what you’re after.

“Performance” options like an arpeggiator and the Strum voicing will play those chords, again, with no piano skills required on your end. And once you work out a sweet-sounding chord progression, you can loop it and play around with melody and basslines to go on top (/underneath).

An Orchid is more of a songwriter sketchpad than a music studio, but as such is going to have a much less intimidating learning curve.

It doesn’t need to stay in a home studio either. The Orchid has a battery inside and speakers, so you can play around with song ideas while staring into the endless dusty Australian outback — which is how we like to imaging Time Impala songs are made.

There are three main synth engines inside: analogue, FM and a reed electric piano emulator. Plus reverb, chorus and delay effects, to make the thing sound more like what you’d hear in an actual recording of a song.

Tempted? An Orchid doesn’t come cheap, and may not be that easy to get hold of for a while. It costs $549, and will be limited to US buyers in its first 1000-unit run in December. We expect to hear of a wider release early next year.

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