Yes!!!!

The Mellotron was impressive when it was released, decades ago, but today??? Obsolete technology. Besides the nostalgia factor there is really nothing special about them anymore

@@looneyburgmusic A model T has nothing over a Tesla - but I would still regard a working model T as amazing.

@@HeatherSpoonheim the Model T is still obsolete

@@looneyburgmusic What can I say - I love seeing old tech in working condition.

Third that! This woman 😍

Love stuff like this. I would have no other opportunity to learn this stuff if it wasn’t posted online.

One can also think that there as been some technological life before digital age ....

Agreed! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/icylnq5708edY58.html

@@freeridemtb2 Well there are these things called libraries where they have books (printed internet) on a lot of subjects. Bet you can find one about Mellotron's there to, but boy i like the internet to, it's much faster.

I had a friend in college that somehow got his hands on a mint condition Mellotron 400 he somehow figured out how to change the tapes with home made recordings to put it simply it was MAGICAL

In my mind for some reason I envisioned a conical cylinder, in which the keys dragged over the surface and resonated different frequencies 😅 I had to look up what was actually going on to put my imagination at ease 🤣

Tape can be replaced easily in the Mellotron.

I was gonna guess: "just not playing it very much". Seems likely to me!

"Watcher of the Skies" by Genesis is a classic example of a Mellotron making you feel uneasy.

The slightly weird sound came from two sources, really. First was that the more notes you pressed at once, the more the tapes would drag on the capstan motor and slow it down. The notes would thus play flat. Also many of the Mellotrons were not playing at the correct speed at the best of times (there was no crystal speed control or anything fancy like that). Secondly the samples on many of the tapes (i.e. notes) were not actually a flat recording of an instrument playing that exact note. When mastering the sounds, they would record one note live at the correct speed, and derive the next few semitones simply by speeding the original sample up or slowing it down. Then when it started getting silly, they would record a live note again, and repeat. So for most of the notes, you were hearing a sped-up or slowed-down recording of the real instrument. That's why things like the vocal samples (especially) sound so weird, especially when played as a chord. Strings and flutes also sound odd this way; stuff like bells, xylophones, less so. Much of the mastering of these sounds was subcontracted to the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, who had the kit to do all this. Nobody kept any notes of the procedures of making each semitone of each instrument, so the only way to make a modern, faithful electronic soundalike is to actually digitally sample an original frame of the tapes. Another factor on sound was tape wear. Yanking the tapes around like this gave all sorts of wow/flutter and stretching effects.

@@sambda very interesting, thanks!

@@sambdaThanks for the insight. In my just-added main comment, I was wondering about exactly that i.e. the sample recording process.

@@josephpusztai The BBC had a set of machined collars for a couple of their main reel-to-reel tape machines which slipped over the capstans thereof. These would speed the tape through by a semitone, tone etc.

I'd love to get a copy of those tapes! Lol. My tron is 1/4" and I need the samples!

The Birotron is even wierder and has a different sound. There's only 2 known to exist in working order though. It's like a mellotron, but it uses 8-tracks instead of magnetic tape strips. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/i7iCas9e2q-aenU.html

You’re just surprised it’s a girl.

@@thetruthexperiment No Joey, only you are surprised that women know things. Stop projecting your thoughts onto others.

@@thetruthexperiment troll better man

I suppose these days a Melletron is just a digital library in one's professional grade digital keyboard synthesizer the mechanical/analog Melletron has it's charms but would be a nightmare to take on a road tour

Was it used in any movies of that era?

@@chadcastagana9181 Check out early King Crimson Stuff. In the court of the Crimson King, In the wake of Poseidon, etc.

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/a514nMaKyL-Yf6s.html

Too bad it was known for constantly breaking down

@@hexkwondo well, the way it worked was not the most efficient design... no wonder it used to break.

looneyburgmusic would like a word with you to tell you how wrong you are. Over and over and over.

Agreed. Passion and love 🔥

Impressive but clunky and unreliable. The tone wheel mechanism that creates the sound of the original Hammond Organ is far more impressive. It’s all mechanical and the purity of its sine wave cannot be matched by a synthesizer.

Yeah, and the mellotron aint bad either! Badum tsss.

Somewhere theres a video of Paul McCartney showing off one..

@@kensims4086 Thanks Ken - I'll look for that.

I was just thinking what a pain this would be to keep working out on the road with Led Zeppelin etc.

They're heavy. Another thing to contend with....

@@Mikishots Yeah you're right but not as heavy as the dreaded Hammond B3.

If I remember correctly, Radiohead (for the OK Computer tour) got around this by sampling each note from an original mellotron and assigning them to the keys on a digital midi workstation, thereby giving themselves a portable version of the instrument.

@@monsieurmitosis Kinda modern sampling, sampling the older sampling lol. It makes sense though.

I was amazed that NO ONE before you mentioned the Moody Blues. Pinder used it as one of the most amazing instruments of the time, supplying that incredible sound tht made their work so distinctive. I'm a huge Moody Blues fan, more so of the early work when Pinder was still with the band. Between his incredible voice and his masterful talent on this instrument, I consider him a "Rock God". I'd love tp know what he sampled to get the sound at the end of "Legend of the Mind" (Timothy Leary if you don't know the song by that name.)

Amazing they didn't have a replacement Mello or synth ready to go.

Love that story, ha!

BatMite19 never mind that, can you imagine being one of the roadies!? Proper nightmare! 😳

The Moody Blues are such a massively underrated group.

If they were all stoned they wouldn't care!

@Roger Craig. She actually touched the tapes, capstan, and rollers. I am sure you know oils from your fingers can contribute a lot to the problems you had among others. Did you ever have a tape wrap around the capstan? How long did the tapes last? Did they stretch and skip at all? Too bad the unit couldn't be hermetically sealed, filled with dry nitrogen, and temperature controlled.

@@paulromsky9527 no matter the atmosphere conditions, the tapes will eventually wear out just due to the constant friction.

​@@paulromsky9527She touched the rotating capstan with a screwdriver at one point.

was "magnetized" an intentional pun

Mike Pinder worked for Mellotron before he joined the group.

Seems like I heard that before. He certainly was a master of the Mellotron too! Not my intention to get political but I believe Mike Pinder got a raw deal from the Moodies. Yeah, he did make a nasty comment about drummer Graeme Edge, but he apologized for it in public. Kind of shut down Mike's career though.

Caravan got me hooked on it. Dave Sinclair originality was amazing though also using an organ.

@@d.od.3463 I don't remember the "nasty comment". I do remember when they got back together and put Octave out in 1977, Pinder said he didn't want to tour (that's when they picked up Patrick Moraz) and quit the band. At least that was the "official" explanation, and one Pinder himself has said in subsequent interviews, claiming having a young family and all, he didn't want to be away from them.

ms8596: I've heard that during a discussion about a musical piece they were composing at the time, Mike Pinder made a disparaging remark to Graeme Edge something like; "Well what would you know, you're just a Drummer!" Such a small thing to carry the weight of Pinder leaving upset. I guess when someone acquires fame and money they become overly sensitive! In my humble opinion, Mike Pinder and Tony Banks WERE the Mellotron!

She restored part of the music insturment history...

I seem to remember the Moody Blues used it in Nights in White Satin too.

@@kingrobert1st , Yes MB used the Mellotron, as did the Beatles, but I first really became aware of, and appreciated the use of the Mellotron with King Crimson's first album. The Mellotron sounds were such a deep and integral part of the songs on that particular record, that it really got my attention. It provided such a far away and mysterious sound to the ingenius compositions of Fripp, Sinfield McDonald and Giles.

have you tried this? www.arturia.com/products/analog-classics/mellotron-v/overview

space oddity david bowie too

They also used it on: Tomorrow Never Knows', 'Flying' and 'The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill'. Also.. Kashmir: Led zeppelin Phaedra: Tangerine dream 2000 Light Years from home: Rolling Stones. And you and I: Yes Watcher of the skies: Genisis Forever Afternoon ( Tuesday): Moody Blues The court of the Crimson King: King Krimson. Trent Reznor even used John Lennon's old melotron on an album.

Stairway to Heaven

Nah-uh. That would be the opening to *Watcher of the skies*.

Let me take you down...

It's more of a rompler, I'd say. Fascinating nevertheless! :-)

It has the illusion of being like a sample playback device, but sampling refers to measuring an analogue signal and storing digital representations.

I was going to say it's more like a sampledler but Mattias Rickardsson beat me to the punch. Read only memorypler.

See though, I always wondered how the Beatles got that opening track so quiet. The mellotron isn't a subtle sounding device, as she pointed out here. But they have that opening with a brief melotron solo! The whole track is pitch shifted as a result of imperfect tracking techniques to get the various layering effects and I sort of wonder if maybe that didn't lower some of the background noise?

And the Moody Blues....

Abbey Road had great old tube powered compressors like the Fairchild along with hi and lo cut filters - basically it would cut off everything else outside the preset "threshold" as it's called. 🎸

I think the Mellotron has a line output withouth any background noise, just like any other tape machine. No compressor required. By the way, a compressor would bring the noise up, not down.

They were filthy loud not just from a crapload of tapeheads wowing and fluttering but all the added noise of each strip of lousy S/N ratio tape. There was no _clean_ "out", the best you could do was mic some Live aspect of it or tap the monitor outs but either way you had to hit it hard with the hi cut but not too much because a lot of the _charm_ lived in the high bands. Add to that the sound of the motor which drove all the capstans and it was deafening. I know, I played 'em back in early 70's. And, did I not mention hi and low cut filters in my post? It was the Fairchild that compressed and limited the Beatles gear to give it the sound. Nobody said compression gets rid of background noise -just listen to CD of 1st 2 LPs and listen to later Pepper stuff - the noise is there, it's just tamed from compression and limiting and low pass/hi cuts for the tape hiss. 🎹

They were mind-blowing, but you'd be amazed how many are still in use today! Streetly Electronics in England, the original mfr., still makes the M-400 & other models, & they're quite open to talking about it. Yahoo even has a Mellotron User's Group, & Martin from Streetly is a frequent contributor. Streetly also makes tape sets from the original masters (beautifully cleaned up) as well as custom tapes from many libraries of early & current sounds. Surely the best way to go, rather than the just-mentioned 3rd party poor quality copies of copies often found for sale. These tapes last a lonnnng time, kept clean & taken care of.

Also strangely enough on Sabbaths song changes.

Woman.

@@Quethecat amen.... and a-woman... am i right??? :D. Ahahahahaha.

I got a virtual M400 Mellotron. its a VST plug-in for programs such as magix music maker. you can have as many mellotrons as you have tracks, Each with its own authentic control panel that reproduces the look and functionality of the original.(memory permitting). also adds controls for reverb and delay and extra instrument sounds.

You could buy like 40 Walkmans and a Casiotone keyboard and make your own. LOL

Yes, yes!

Great analogy! To me these analogue keyboards have a more "organic" sound; even the same note played repeatedly sounds very slightly different every time. I have thought of "breathing" when I hear Mellotrons and Hammonds.

No sustain pedal, then?

Certainly a limitation for sounds of instruments which are capable of playing sounds for as long as a player would like, eg violin or organ pipe, but not for ones which have natural limitations on their durations. Xylophone would be an obvious example. But no rapid repetition of sound as can be done with a xylophone. Commenters on this page said that Mellotrons were used for sound effects in TV and movies, eg footsteps.

@@LaurieWilliams-lk8fc I used a very similar instrument called a Novatron in radio drama at the South African Broadcasting Corporation in the 80s. We had short sound effects like gunshots, car doors, crashes of all sorts and sizes, glass breaking, horse sounds, etc. We had a 2nd tape rack with audience laughter which I lifted off actual live comedy show recordings we did and played them into shows when we didn't actually have a live audience. The laughter ranged from small sniggers to bigger laugh reactions. By combining different keys one could vary the laughs so they sounded different and didn't have that unnatural "canned" laughter sound. It was an art to get the laughter to sound real.

@@NatalRobin Thanks for this Robin. So you're one of the people guilty of "canned laughter" then. Do you remember the sound effects used in the Warner Brothers cartoons? I remember one well, a recording of a great lot of things crashing down onto a hard surface, with a piece of pipe still bouncing and clattering after all the other things had settled. The people who set up the items ready to fall, let them go and made the recordings must have had a lot of fun doing them.

@Bruce Barker. Yes, that tension springed roller pulled the tape back to its start. Over time I am sure the tapes would stretch and that causes a lot of out of tune notes the device makes. If I was playing keyboards back then, I would NEVER have bought a Mellotron... good concept, poor execution. I would have gone for a Moog. Can you imagine being a hit group using a Mellotron with thousands of people paying top dollar to hear you play an instrument that was getting progressively out tune (each tape stretching independently), notes not being reset (due to temperature/humidity), or tapes wrapping up on the capstan (loss of notes).

IIRC the manufacturers offer(ed) exactly that service. You provide the audio and they'll turn it into a tape rack. However, it can't really do loops. The tapes are 7s long. When the tape runs out, there's a break in the playback as the tape rewinds, and then the note restarts. You can hear this happening on "Albion Awake" by Art Bears

....And of Woman - such as this fine young Lady Genius.

I thought she was smart when she restored the electronics like the old capacitors that went dry. She confirmed her genius when she engineered it better to remove the flawed ground loops that introduced more mains hum distortion into the instrument.

I’m not normally one to point stuff like this out but I feel like you wouldn’t have mentioned that if a dude made this video

Robbie Clark ugh, really. Shut up

Mr. W Normally my inclination might be to tell me to shut up too, but I don’t think I’m wrong in this instance, I really don’t

@@robbieclark7828 you might be right

Chronicles of Bap sheesh, man up already.

Well she knows the electronics pretty well, I'm sure. According to this site: www.mellotron.com/tech.htm the motor is supplied with 22 volts. So not really dangerous.

well, seeing as she restored the thing.. i think she knows what shes doing.