The first musical instrument I ever played was a Bontempi 104 Electric Chord Organ. It was bought for my brother before I was born. I clearly remember playing with it before I was four. Our parents had bought some simple song books which used colours to identify the notes, and they had glued a colour key over the keyboard. That enabled me to play transcribed music before I could read. (My musical notation parsing skills haven’t improved much since then, though.)

This bad boy worked using an electric motor which blew air through a pipe. The keys would open holes along the pipe, letting the air whistle through at the right pitch. From what I remember it was polyphonic, but its polyphony was limited by the air pressure: press too many keys, and the thing would just produce pathetic whimpers and then just a low hiss. The eight brutalist buttons on the left produced root-third-fifth chords: Bb, F, C, and G, in major and minor. Because the minor keys were black, I developed an early distaste for the minor scales.

Lifting the orange cover and peering inside allowed me to discover that the chord buttons worked by opening three dedicated holes simultaneously. By holding a chord button down and blocking some of the holes with my fingers, I discovered that a chord is made of three separate notes, and learned how to duplicate the effect using the normal keyboard. I figure I could construct minor and major chords by the time I was six or seven.

When I finally got over my initial apprehension and started playing with the black chord buttons I discovered pentatonic scales and started improvising pentatonic solos over a repeating Cm F chord progression. (Sadly, I have only recently started moving away from the Cm scale in terms of keyboard improvisation.) Later, I independently invented the twelve-bar blues, although I admit that I might have been inadvertently exposed to rock and roll through the radio by that point.

It was only on my tenth birthday, when I had thoroughly exhausted the capabilities of the Bontempi (and had broken off several keys), that my parents bought me the serious sounding Technics SX-K250 electronic keyboard, with PCM sample playback, and women have adored me ever since.