Not Milan: the Ancona province.

Logan Electronics was a Marche company, based in the province of Ancona, not in Milan. Italian Wikipedia’s article on the firm gives its seat as Ancona and its form as an S.r.l., a limited company, and places it in the Castelfidardo–Loreto–Recanati district alongside Elka, EKO, Elgam and CRB. Its main source is the Castelfidardo collector, dealer and restorer Claudio Capponi, whose cultural association also runs an annual Farfisa Day in the town, and whose “History of Logan” dates the company to the late 1960s. We found no founder’s name — Capponi names no founder or owner, and we found none elsewhere — but he names Carmelo Castorina as its musical consultant and director.

Logan began with organs. Capponi lists console organs called the Weekend and the Caravelle, the latter in De Luxe, Special and Supreme versions.

String keyboards were a district speciality in the 1970s. Crumar’s Stringman followed in 1974 and its Multiman, which combined strings with other sounds, in the mid-1970s, according to the Crumar historian Enrico Bassi; Elka made a string keyboard called the Rhapsody, Capponi says. Logan’s String Melody belongs to the same family of instruments.

Readers searching for the firm should note the name. “Logan” is also a Dacia and Renault car, two early American automobiles, a 2017 film and an airport in Boston. We use “Logan Electronics” throughout to make clear which Logan we mean.

The String Melody.

Logan’s best-known instrument was the String Melody, a string synthesizer. English Wikipedia says it was designed by the engineer Giuliano Costantin and made from 1973 to 1982 — most of a decade — with a String Melody II from 1977; Italian Wikipedia gives about 1976 to 1980, so we note both. English Wikipedia describes a four-octave keyboard split in two, faders for cello, viola and violin, a mono bass and percussion section, and an ensemble effect built on three TCA350 bucket-brigade chips; it weighed about 23 kilograms. English Wikipedia flags its article on the instrument as needing more references, and its details on the String Melody II rest on enthusiast sites.

It was also sold under another name. Italian Wikipedia says it was marketed under the Hohner brand as well, and English Wikipedia’s article on the organist Klaus Wunderlich mentions a “String Melody (also branded as Logan String Melody)” on an all-Hohner album by the German organist. English Wikipedia, in its article on the String Melody, also links the instrument to Vox’s “String Thing,” but another English Wikipedia article says the String Thing was a rebranded Jen instrument; we do not repeat the Vox claim. The Jen instrument, according to that article, was the SM2007.

Capponi records a saying of the period — “Pianoforte FENDER – violini LOGAN”, a Fender piano and Logan strings — which we give as his account; the Fender piano of the saying is the Rhodes electric piano sold by Fender. The instrument is still heard today: on the British-American band the Pretenders’ 2023 album Relentless, James Walbourne, the band’s guitarist, is credited with a “Logan String Melody keyboard” on the ninth track.

Logan was not the only maker in this guide whose string or synth instruments went out under other names. Siel’s were sold by ARP and Sequential, and Jen’s SM2007, by one English Wikipedia account, became the Vox String Thing.

The other badge.

Italian electronic instruments of the 1960s to the 1980s often reached the world under other names. English Wikipedia records that Siel’s 1979 Orchestra was sold in the United States by ARP as the Quartet, and that its OR400 of 1982 was sold by Sequential Circuits as the Prelude; that the Logan String Melody, designed by the engineer Giuliano Costantin, was also sold under the Hohner name; and, according to the guitar historian Jack Marchal, that Welson’s guitars were sold in Germany under the Dynacord name.

Some Italian names did become famous in their own right. Farfisa, formed in 1946 from the accordion makers Settimio Soprani, Scandalli and Frontalini, made Compact organs that English Wikipedia says were used by Pink Floyd, Sly Stone, Blondie and Philip Glass. Elka’s Synthex, designed by Mario Maggi, was made in about 1,850 units between 1981 and 1985, according to the same source.

Many of these firms did not survive the 1980s. Siel’s life, by English Wikipedia’s account, ran from 1976 to 1986; Crumar stopped trading in 1986 or 1987; Generalmusic, owner of LEM and Elka, was declared bankrupt in 2011. Their names have since been revived, sold or left dormant — and the guides below say which.

Logan is a clear example of that pattern: a Marche string machine also sold under Hohner’s name.

“Fender piano, Logan strings.”

The district went into crisis at the end of the 1970s under Asian competition, Italian Wikipedia says, and Logan changed course. Capponi says it partly switched to building traditional pianos under licence from Baldwin, the American piano maker — “more than 2,500” of them; Italian Wikipedia says it took commissions from Baldwin. Other district firms, Italian Wikipedia says, moved into lighting, photovoltaics and telecommunications; Logan moved into acoustic pianos — and, with the Baldwin work, into making instruments under another firm’s name, the reverse of the String Melody story. We found no closure date; Italian Wikipedia has carried a note since 2018 asking whether the company is still operating.

There is no official Logan website. The loganelectronics.com and logan.it addresses are parked, and other variants, such as logan-electronics.com, sat behind security checks and could not be read. We found no documented logo, colours or typeface for the brand, so the palette here is our own. Capponi’s history, the main source on the company, survives only in an archived copy from 2014.

For a design guide, Logan shows how a single product can carry a company’s name further than the company itself. Compare Crumar, another Marche maker of string machines, and Siel, whose instruments were also sold under American names. For this guide we use a violet and a lilac with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no instrument or logo is reproduced.

Keep Logan Electronics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.