Reference · Updated August 2026

The Omnichord: a complete history

It was sold to people who couldn't play anything. It ended up on records by some of the most inventive musicians of the last forty years. This is the whole story — every model, every documented recording, and why a beginner's instrument became a collector's one.

What is an Omnichord?

An Omnichord is an electronic instrument built around one idea: separate choosing the harmony from playing the notes. Your left hand presses a chord button. Your right hand sweeps a flat, touch-sensitive plate — the strum plate, or "SonicStrings" — and hears a harp-like arpeggio.

The plate has no strings on it. It's a touch sensor that triggers notes from an internal synthesiser, and it only ever triggers notes belonging to the chord you're currently holding. Change the chord and the plate silently retunes itself.

That single design decision is why the instrument matters. You cannot play a wrong note. Someone who has never touched an instrument can produce a shimmering, perfectly tuned chord within seconds of picking one up. Suzuki aimed it squarely at people who found a keyboard intimidating.

Origins: the 1980 prototypes

Suzuki built two prototypes in 1980 — the PC-27 Portachord and the Tronichord — before launching the first production Omnichord, the OM-27, in 1981. The Tronichord was released alongside it.

The lineage runs back much further than 1980, though. The Omnichord is an electronic reimagining of the autoharp: a boxed zither with felt-damped chord bars that you press to mute every string except the ones belonging to a chord, then strum. The autoharp had been a parlour and folk instrument since the late 19th century. Suzuki's contribution was to replace the strings with a synthesiser and the chord bars with buttons, and in doing so remove the last physical skill the instrument still required.

The OM-27 (1981)

The original. Twenty-seven chord buttons, a strum plate, preset drum rhythms, and controls for volume, tempo and sustain. It had exactly one sound, called "harp". Around 40,000 units shipped in 1981, mostly to the United States and United Kingdom — a genuinely successful launch for an instrument nobody had a category for.

Every model, in order

The number in each model name tells you how many chords it plays. It's the tidiest naming scheme in the history of musical instruments.

Model histories for the middle years vary between sources and regional releases. Treat the late-80s and 90s rows as a summary rather than a definitive list.

The sound

It's unmistakable: bright, glassy, slightly synthetic, with a long chiming tail. Early models had one voice and no pretensions about realism — nobody mistook it for a harp. That honesty is exactly why it aged well. It doesn't sound like a bad imitation of an acoustic instrument; it sounds like itself.

Later models added a sustained chord-organ layer underneath the strum, plus drum patterns and an auto-bass line that follows your chord changes. Hold a chord, start a rhythm, and you have an entire arrangement running under one finger.

The artists

Suzuki built it for beginners. What happened instead is that people with total command of conventional instruments picked it up precisely because it worked differently. These uses are documented:

Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois — "Deep Blue Day" (1983)

From Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Eno and Lanois recorded an Omnichord and slowed the recording down, producing the deep, liquid, jukebox-like tone the track is built on. It's probably the most admired thing anyone has done with the instrument, and it reached a far wider audience when Trainspotting used the track in 1996.

Eurythmics — "Love Is a Stranger" (1982)

The Omnichord's harp voice, used on a hit single barely a year after the instrument launched. An early sign that it wasn't going to stay a beginner's toy.

Gorillaz — "Clint Eastwood" (2001)

Damon Albarn used the "Rock 1" preset from an OM-300. This is almost certainly the most-heard Omnichord recording ever made — a rhythm preset from a discontinued beginner's instrument, sitting under one of the defining singles of the decade.

David Bowie — "America" (2001)

Bowie opened the Concert for New York City, three weeks after the September 11 attacks, performing Simon & Garfunkel's "America" seated on the stage floor with an Omnichord. Given the occasion and the audience, it's the instrument's most exposed single moment.

Daniel Johnston

The artist most responsible for the Omnichord's cult standing. Johnston's lo-fi home recordings — made on a cheap boombox, with the instrument sitting next to the microphone — are among the most emotionally direct records anyone has made, and they made the Omnichord's plain, unglamorous sound into something people sought out deliberately.

A note on accuracy: Johnston also used a Magnus chord organ, and sources frequently conflate the two instruments. He is strongly associated with the Omnichord, but be sceptical of any source pinning it to one specific album without evidence.

Others

Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire and Mark Mothersbaugh have all used one. The instrument has a particular hold on artists who work in texture rather than virtuosity — its limitations are the point.

Why it became a cult object

• It removes doubt. The gap between having a musical idea and hearing it is where most ideas die. The Omnichord closes that gap to about four seconds.
• It sounds like nothing else. No sampled instrument replicates the specific glassy character of that early synthesis.
• It was cheap and then it wasn't. Sold as an affordable beginner's instrument, discontinued, then rediscovered — the classic route to collectability.
• Constraint is generative. You can't play everything on it, so you play things you wouldn't otherwise have played.
• It's disarming. Hand one to somebody who says they're "not musical" and watch what happens. That moment is the whole appeal.

The 2024 revival: the OM-108

In 2024 Suzuki released the OM-108, the first new Omnichord in 26 years. It had been planned for 2023 to mark the company's 70th anniversary, then postponed to refine the specification.

It plays 108 chords from one to three buttons — major, minor, augmented, diminished, sus4 and add9 — and recreates the OM-84's voice using analogue circuitry rather than samples. It launched at roughly £739 in the UK, about $934 in the US.

That price tells you how completely the instrument's status changed. The OM-27 was a beginner's purchase. Its descendant is a boutique instrument.

Buying a vintage one today

If you want an original, know what you're taking on:

• Strum plates fail. The touch sensor is the part most likely to have gone insensitive or dead in patches. Test every inch of it.
• Power supplies are a known weak point. Many units arrive without the original adaptor; check voltage and polarity before plugging anything in.
• Membrane buttons die. Press every chord button, not a sample.
• Foam perishes. Forty-year-old internal foam turns to dust and can be corrosive.
• Prices vary enormously by model and condition. Working units commonly go for several hundred pounds; the more sought-after models go higher.

None of that is a reason not to buy one. If you love objects, an original is a joy and holds its value. But go in informed.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Dates, model details and shipment figures checked August 2026 against Wikipedia, Perfect Circuit's history of the Omnichord, Omnichord Heaven's model archive, MusicRadar, MusicTech on the OM-108 and Gearnews. Where sources disagree — particularly on the late-1980s and 1990s models — this page says so rather than picking one.

Published 7 August 2026 · Written by Connor Clements

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