Mellotron, optigan & orchestron

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antispatula

antispatula

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Has anyone ever heard of these?!?!

I just discovered them through some music on myspace. They sounds soooo cool.

What they are are keyboards that are ANALOG samplers....

That's right, the first samplers ever made, made in the early 60's.

They either use tape of disks, and when you touched a certian key it would playback the recording of lets say a violin or organ or clarinet from the tape banks in the keyboard that could be swapped out for different samples.

Why weren't these more popular, how come I've never heard of them before?! I'm into this band where all they use are the Mellotron, optigan & orchestron (and vox) and it all sounds increadible and wonderfully unusual in my opinion.
 
The Mellotron was a bitch to move and needed service after every performance. Insanely expensive, fragile and weren't that many made.
 
The band Aloha uses homemade melotrons that sound very, very cool. Check them out if you get a chance. On another note, both the Beatles and the Zombies used melotrons (Abbey Road had one or more).
 
antispatula said:
Has anyone ever heard of these?!?!
Why weren't these more popular, how come I've never heard of them before?!
Click to expand...
Ah, you've discovered that little secret, eh? Welcome aboard. :)

Actually they sounds are amazingly popular at the moment, to the point at which you can't sell a workstation keyboard if it doesn't have the sounds on it.
Apparently the real thing is back in production to - you can buy new ones for about £6000. Like me, the rest of us have to make do with samples.

The mellotron is a staple of 1960s-1970s progressive rock, which is my favourite style. It is responsible for the flute sounds on 'Strawberry Fields' by The Beatles, and the etherial strings which crop up on 'Nights in White Satin' by the Moody Blues among many, many other songs. Try and find a copy or clip of the start of 'Starless' by King Crimson (not to be confused with 'Starless and Bible Black'). 'Epitaph' from their first album 'Court of the Crimson King' is probably the only record to use the bassoon tape. The whole album uses the Mk2 extensively.

Virtually every genesis album from about 1970-1980 has some mellotron on it. (I see someone else has already posted a link to the Mellotron list). IMHO one of their finest moments was the ending of 'Entangled' on their 'Trick of the Tail' album which has this choir at the end which I found utterly jaw-dropping.
I remember when I suddenly realised that it was the same choir that was on 'The Roaring Silence' by Manfred Mann's Earth Band.. it was sort of like 'Duhhh!'. Up until then I'd thought the mellotron was just a string/flute machine. The choir tapes were introduced with the M400 (mark 4, in effect).

I actually bought the Roland M-VS1 (and thereby started building my studio) on the strength of its M400 choir. 'This is my truth, tell me yours' by the Manic Street Preachers used it too in preference to the real thing.
After a while I began to hear the loops and flaws in it, so around January this year, I decided to get something better - the official Mellotron sample CD, containing each note of each tape.

I suppose I could have bought an AKAI sampler to load it into, but I decided to make my own from a spare PC. It runs in DOS and the entire playback software is a 26k .COM file, all my own work :D

Once I'd got the MIDI implementation stable enough to work from sequencer control, it sounded like this:


Then there's this (yes, it's done on tape with tape echo and spring reverb. The dialogue in the middle was digitally composited though):


This song has all three cardinal sounds, the classic 'three violins' (recorded in Harry Chamberlin's bedroom in the mid 1950s), the flutes (from the MVS-1 in this case, the flutes are a bit hard to tune) and finally the M400 choir, soaked in reverb as it should be.

I don't think anyone has mentioned the Chamberlin yet. This was the original design that the Streetly Mellotron was poached from. Unlike the Mellotron with its 8-second tapes, the Chamberlin used loops and therefore could be held indefinitely.

Since the Mellotron sample disk came with the Chamberlin tapes as well, I used the female choir in the end of the score for this too:
(starts around 2:02)

Now, the Optigan and its professional sibling the Orchestron are interesting too, although rarer and somewhat lower fidelity than the 'tron. These are the machines that use optical playback (hence the name 'OPTIcal orGAN' of celluloid disks with the sounds encoded like a film soundtrack. Apparently people mess with the sounds by photocopying the disks onto OHP transparencies and drawing on them.
I believe Steve Hackett used it in one of his later albums, and Kraftwerk used the Orchestron choir on 'Radioactivity'. 'Blue Monday' by New Order had the same choir as well, but I think it was a sample from their EMU Emulator.

**EDIT**
Manikin Electronics GMBH make a digital mellotron, which is still horrifically expensive (around £1200). Check it out anyway.. they have a rather nice demo MP3.
http://www.manikin-electronic.com/en/index.html

What most people seem to be using these days is the Gmedia M-TRON softsynth. I might have used it myself except it was out-of-print at the time (seems to have reappeared though) and like my embedded DOS machine, I wanted an appliance that should be switched on and off at will, rather than a Windows installation which requires even more maintenance than a tape deck.
 
MELLOTRON
I bought a new Mellotron in 1971 and owned it for about ten years after seeing Yes use one.

Overall, it was manageable in the studio. If you compressed the mono output...really compressed it, then doubled the signal left-right with a ddl, and constantly rode the pitch knob to keep it in tune....AND kept punching in on tracks if you wanted to play chords more than about six seconds at a time....it was okay. It was the only thing in those days that would make "that" sound, so it had it's place.

I quickly found that the Mellotron was totally useless live as the tapes would jam under high heat, humidity, or any other random reason.

When tapes jammed up, you had to lift off the front panel, lift off the top panel, unscrew the keyboard and take it off, reach way back behind an unjam the tape, put everything back together...total frustration...and obviously not something you could deal with every ten minutes on stage in a humid club or cold building.

There was a capstan the length of the keyboard and 35 very crummy playback heads. It would take me a good hour to clean the heads and get dust out of the convoluted tape path...which ultimately had nothing to do with whether or not the machine would jam.

When a tape snap would happen in just the wrong way, the tape would break....an often occurance. A replacement spool of 3/8" tape...for one note of three instruments...was $55. This added to the total frustration of owning a Mellotron. Which is why in my experience, lots of people bought Mellotrons (I sold a pretty good clip of them as a dealer by 74-75)...but few people would keep them. Once you used one for more than six months, you almost couldn't wait to sell it and be free of the headaches. It was such a frustrating machine, that it could almost make you cry...especially whenever you thought of the chunk of money they costed and the cost of replacement tapes.

I sampled all my racks of tapes before selling my Mellotron and then started using them in samplers once the heavtier ram versions started appearing. I have pretty much all the software based Mellotron libraries, and they are all pretty much the same...very useable compared to the original machine.

ORCHESTRON
I was introduced to this at a private showing at the 1976 Namm show. The next year, the thing was being displayed on the main floor and Patrick Moraz was hired to demo the thing at Namm. The version being demo'd had three keyboard tiers, and a bank of disk loaders next to it. When Moraz wasn't playing, you could stand there playing it and ask questions. I listened to Moraz, and I played it myself. It sucked. Very screechy, weird weird bad fidelity. The sound disks were as big or bigger than 33 1/3 records and...they would break. There was a broken one sitting right there in the booth on one of the days I was there...someone had bumped it wrong and snapped it. I couldn't believe that they didn't put it away somewhere where people couldn't see it. I mean...Melltron replacement tapes were stratospherically expensive....I took a look at those Orchestron disks and figured it cost a mint to replace one of those.

Another thing about the Orchestron was the price. For it's day, it was as expensive as later Fairlights and Synclaviers would be. I really thought the thing was out of place at a Namm show.

Sort of off topic from the Orchestron, but at the 1977 Namm show where the Orchstron deal was happening, Yamaha was doing a cool thing in their huge booth. They had their old gigantic live mixers set up all over the place and a few MCI 1" 8 track machines sitting around, all loaded with safeties of the multitrack studio tapes of America's "Ventura Highway". You could stand there mixing the song any old way you wanted through the Yamaha mixers. It was a weird idea they had, but it was kinda fun.
 
wow, so, the Mellotron is really, not a synthesizer at all, but a really complex, convolluted tape player with keys on it, and the tape is chopped up into 8-second long segments, and each segment has its own transport.

Gnarly. Yet, semmingly pointless :confused:

I guess it does pass as a sampler. As was mentioned in the first post. A really finniky one at that.
 
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