Some time ago, following advice from Suibhne and others, I bought one of these. I didn't do much with it at the time, although I did like the sound; the fan was a bit too vocal for me to want to take it out with me, and I wasn't doing any recording at the time.

Seven weeks ago I started the 52 Folk Songs project. One of the nice things about 52fs is that it's forcing me to listen to myself singing, and to think about how I could make improvements to the - indubitably mellifluous - noises I make. One possible improvement would be a chordal or drone backing, such as might be provided by... aha!

And so it was that I recorded Derwentwater's Farewell with Bontempi B1 drone backing and melody intro (plus whistle outro). Has anyone else recorded with one of these things? I like the sound a lot, apart from the sound of the fan; I wonder what someone who can actually play keyboards could do with one. In my defence, the halting phrasing at the start of the track is deliberate; it doesn't just mean I was playing badly (if I was playing badly I'd be hitting the wrong notes, not playing the right notes slowly). I'm not sure where I got the idea - it might have begun as a homage to Julian Cope's harmonium work on "Hey High-Class Butcher". If the whistle at the end sounds amateurish, on the other hand, that's not deliberate - it's played about as well as I could manage it.

One other technical note: when I dusted off the Bontempi I found that the bottom six keys had gone dead since I last played it, reducing its original two-octave range by half an octave. This meant that I had to transpose the melody from D into G in order to play the whole thing. Since I was singing it in D, I also had to pitch-shift the recording back down from G to D; if you listen carefully to the first few seconds you can hear the sound of the fan being pitch-shifted down.

Links:

Derwentwater's Farewell (Phil Edwards: vocal, Bontempi B1 reed organ, whistle, processing)
Notes on Derwentwater's Farewell
52fs