Metamatic Forums Socialising The Green Room The Mellotron

I can't believe all that is raining down from heaven. It's just as exciting as the early eighties. Along with all the CDs released this month and next month we have a book released on the first real string machine, the mighty mellotron. From the Beatles, through the Moody Blues to OMD the mellotron has provided such enchanting sounds. BTW OMD used a version of this, the Novatron. Sadly, Bowie is not interviewed here, as we all know he used another version of this on his Berlin Triology, the Chamberlin.

Being an old romantic I couldn't resist the temptation and ordered a copy from:

http://www.deserthearts.com/mellotron.html

It'll be the book that I'll be reading after Enos' On Some Far Away Beach.

Chris

Hi Chris and thanks for the tip on this book. I'll try to persuade my bank balance to part with the money, or just ask Santa for it

The Mellotron is one of my all time favourite instruments and gives me goose bumps and tingles up and down my spine when I hear it played and placed well within almost any style of music. It has so many very beautiful sounds that I can only imagine must have been stolen from another dimension and sneaked back to our world, then being placed into this box for all to admire – completely unique and capable of bringing tears to my eyes and wonder to my heart.

How I wish that I could afford to buy a Mellotron to use in my own music, or even rent out a studio that had one (the only thing is that I wouldn't want to leave).

By the way, I too have the Brian Eno book 'On some far away beach' and am looking forward to reading that very soon.
Garden

Me too.

I couldn't afford one and have no space to put one if I could afford it! So, I think I'm gonna treat myself to this next year;

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/GForceMTron.html

and this as well;

http://www.propellerheads.se/products/refills/ark/

Many thanks for those links Mr Beach, very interesting indeed.

I've known about the "M-Audio GForce M-Tron" for quite a few years now, but have only just discovered that it now works on Macs, whereas for a long time it was just for PCs. I wasn't aware of the "Abbey Road Keyboards" thing, which also seems super.

I don't record my music on a computer yet, but I'm hoping to next year to increase the sound quality and manipulation options, so the M-Tron looks like it may get another customer. The only danger being that I'll be sorely tempted to swamp my currently humanistic, hands on, approach with the sounds of nonetheless beautiful digital samples (as opposed to the very much warmer sounding tapes of the actual Mellotron). Hmmm, we'll see what happens!

Of course, I'd still like to get free reign with a real live Mellotron and be able to caress the beast itself, but all I can really say about these virtual versions is WOW!

Garden
PS: by the way, you don't appear to have a "www." thing in your messages, so there's no way to hear the music that you make.