From Pea Hicks, The king of the Optigan.

This is a GE Play-Talk from 1950. It’s a kid’s toy, but it’s actually pretty advanced for the time, since tape recorders were just starting to become available. This is a tape recorder / record player hybrid. The paper disc is coated with magnetic tape and the tonearm has a tape recorder head on it. The little plastic disc that goes over the “tape” disc has a spiral groove for guiding the tonearm. The speaker serves double duty as the microphone. All tube electronics.

What’s great is the way you can play/record in random access mode. There’s no erase head, so the sounds just keep building on top of each other until you erase the disc with a bulk tape eraser.

In the 2nd part of the video, I use another fantastic GE toy- the Tote-A-Tune keyboard from the early 70s. I record a scale onto the disc, then attempt to play a tune by manually moving the tonearm over the disc. Lots of creative lo-fi applications for this sucker!!