Vox was better-equipped than any musical instrument company of the 1960s to combine a guitar with an organ.

After all, JMI (Vox’s parent company) had been making electronic organs since the late 1940s and electric guitars since the late 1950s. When Robert Moog demonstrated his first synthesizer in 1964 at the Audio Engineering Society convention, the timing must have seemed perfect for electric sounds on a guitar.

Vox engineers wired the guitar’s frets to tone generators from its highly successful Continental model combo organ. In addition to Ocatave, Organ Tone and Flute sounds, they also provided the guitarist with onboard rhythm sounds. Six pushbuttons controlled individual strings. The angular body of Vox’s Phantom guitars provided aesthetically appropriate lines for the rows of controls.

The result was a modernistic instrument with which a guitarist could theoretically play a guitar along with a supporting organ part and a rhythm section (as well as in various other combinations), but in practice, the Phantom Guitar Organ was simply an electronic mess.

It was introduced in 1966 and didn’t last a year.