Strike up the band… and strike out the musicians. Such was the promise of The Self-Contained Hootenanny, featured in our catalogue and on our website in 2014. “This is the autonomous mechanical band that uses 17 instruments built into its oak cabinet to generate a verifiable shin-dig,” our copy says.

Upon selection of one of 13,000 songs via the touchscreen, this orchestra non grata launches into an instrumental rendition of said tune. We use the term “instrumental” advisedly. The sounds aren’t recorded or sampled: they’re produced by mechanically striking the guitar and banjo strings, drum heads, xylophone bars, what have you. There are real instruments really being played - just not directly by human hands.

How does The Self-Contained Hootenanny actually sound? This video of it playing Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” brings to mind such adjectives as “carnivalesque” and “whimsical”. We’re not sure how apt the term “hootenanny” is; the sound here is less folky and more fanciful, closer in spirit to They Might Be Giants than Pete Seeger. But life gives you few legitimate chances to use the word “hootenanny”. When one comes, you’d best take it.

Alas, the $54,000 price tag kept The Self-Contained Hootenanny off our best-seller list. Imagine the live musical performances you could commission for that amount. But it was a prolific provoker of commentary. “Adorable“, “ridiculously expensive“, and “it’s not like anyone else is going to be dumb enough to make one“ were among the judgments passed by the Internetariat of those simpler times.

The last of which strikes us as badly mistaken, considering the makers, Ragtime Automated Music, have been smart enough to stay in business since 1971 concocting thousands of such contraptions. They range in size from automated ukuleles to custom multi-instrument monuments like this one, all played mechanically through the magic of pneumatics.

One of their machines was bought by the producers of Cheers for set decoration, as good an indication as any of their cultural and aesthetic character. Jazz star Pat Metheny recorded an album with Ragtime gear; the company’s website touts fans ranging from Peter Jackson to Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Automated music machines like these are known as orchestrions. The most common is the player piano, and the concept is the same all the way up to The Self-Contained Hootenanny. A piece of music is encoded somehow - on a paper roll, or nowadays, digitally - and the orchestrion plays it with mechanical action on physical instruments.

As you’d expect, they arose well before the advent of recorded music, all the way back in the late 1700s, peaking in the late 1800s just as sound recording appeared. If you wanted to insist orchestrions and other mechanical melody makers, like music boxes, were in fact the earliest form of recorded music, I wouldn’t argue with you. The conceptual difference between a stylus playing the grooves on a record and a piano playing the holes in a paper roll seems minor to me.

No, The Self-Contained Hootenanny did not inspire a mass movement toward playfully quaint automated music. And no, we don’t sell it anymore. But when that xylophone kicks in over those pounding swing drums, we remain fully prepared to verify the shin-dig.

We may not have any of these knocking around the warehouse, but with The Best Portable Record Player & More, the hootenanny goes on forever.

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