Entertainment For Lively Minds
10 Best Songs Using A Mellotron
Posted by itfc1959 on 7 October 2009 - 7:46pm.
1. Most of 'Selling England By The Pound'
2. 'This Wheel's On Fire'
3. 'Ha! Ha! Said The Clown'
4. 'Space Oddity'
5. 'Wonderwall'
6. 'Starless'
7. 'Wild Wood'
8. 'excerpts from 6 wives etc' off Yessongs
9. That Julian Cope song about the land of fear
10. most of Lilly Allen's album
Aye thenk yaow
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Oh Caroline
by Matching Mole........sublime !
Wot no Moody Blues?
Very good, but you forgot
1) Most of Threshold of a Dream, particularly "Side 2" beginning with "Never Comes The Day"
2) Legend of a Mind
Also from groups who are not the Moody Blues:-
1) Circus - Track 1 from Lizard - King Crimson
2) Watcher of the Skies - Genesis
3) Pretty much anything else by King Crimson or Genesis pre-1976
4) I am sure the first album by the mighty Elbow, Asleep At The Back, features some too.
Erm, Strawberry Fields Forever?
And Catapult by Counting Crows. But maybe that's just me.
Greenslade
most of Bedside Manners and Time and Tide
Ahhh, Greenslade
I loved their album covers but never actually heard them. Suggest a few good tracks to download?
Difficult one Twang old boy
as I haven't actually heard them in a long time, all my Greenslade is on vinyl or musicassette. From memory I'd suggest "Melange" from the first album (ostensibly a bass work-out), 'Pilgrims Progress' from Bedside Manners, "Spirit of the Dance" and "Joie De Vivre" from Spyglass Guest, the title track of "Time & Tide"*, plus "Catalan" and "Gangsters".
Had a look on Spotty but there's hee-haw apart from some awful Dave Greenslade MOR.
*I hope I did okay there Arch and stuck with The Valpariso Convention.
Bedside Manners are Extra
The title track is the one to go for in my view - outstanding.
Just bought
BSMAE from iTunes for frites - thanks!
This thread reminds me
it's been far too long since I last listened to this and it's parent album:
Isn't that
just wonderful?
makes my day everytime I hear it
WHAT
A SONG!
I do ration myself
too much joy can ruin a miserable man
Watcher of the Skies
Is my personal Moogtastic favourite - especially the 1973 Live version.
Led Zeppelin had a great melomoment
The Rain Song, from Houses of the Holy.
Entangled
By Genesis.
Now then.
Who can tell me, without resorting to Google, the basic workings of a Mellotron and can name me songs which prominently feature the individual Mellotron sounds?
The most obvious one to my ear is always the choir sound which features in Radiohead's Exit Music (From A Film)
I can
Each note is a loop of tape and when you press a key you make contact with between a play head and the tape. The tape only lasts about 8 seconds so that's as long as you can hold the note down for before it stops - often with a squiggle on the pitch as the tape slows and stops. Also you get all the wow and flutter that you'd get on tape.
They were a complete pain to tour with needing regular repairing (sometimes in between songs), and changing sounds takes about 5 minutes.
a pedant wonders...
This is from memory but I think the Mellotron uses tape strips, not loops. The reason the max length of a note is (approx) 8 secs is simply because at that point, the tape has to be rewound. A loop mechanism would enable longer, or continuous sounds.
Changing the sounds is actually a case of changing the whole bank of tapes, for all the notes, inside the machine. These are housed on a rack. You can therefore, if you so wish, make your own sounds using a tape recorder, then insert these into the machine.
The whole thing is a fantastic feat of unlikely engineering, really, and makes the Hammond tonewheel organ look like a piece of solid-state kit. Well, almost.
It does indeed use strips rather than loops
There was a similar machine called the Chamberlin which, so I'm told, used loops. I haven't seen one in the flesh so I can't vouch for that.
The loop approach had the advantage of being able to sustain notes for longer than 8 seconds but, unlike the Mellotron, tapes couldn't have a noticable start - such as a fade-in.
The Mellotron is truly a wonderous piece of 'bodge' engineering. An unholy mass of springs, pushrods and tape strips. I was going to 'restore' one once but chickened out when I took the back off.
There was also a legendary, if short lived machine called the Birotron, designed by one Dave Biro and bankrolled by Rick Wakeman, which worked on Chamberlin/Mellotron principles but used a bank of 8-track tape cartidges rather than a tape rack.
To my knowledge, one Birotron was made and it only appeared on Tormato by Yes.
Strips/ loops
Yep, I forgot about the tape being strips, hence the 8-second limit and the need to move spider-like across the keyboard when playing long chords.
Although hardly any birotrons were made, samples of them are easy to get hold of, I (and many others, I suspect) have the M-Tron and M-Tron Pro plug-ins which have lots of sounds from the Mellotron, Chamberlain, Birotron and a few other devices.
Now there are various companies producing Mellotrons or Mellotron-like devices, notably the Mellotron VI and the digital Memotron (as seen in Air's new studio if you saw the video on the Guardian's website).
Or you could build your own out of walkmans.
There's also the Optigan and the Orchestron which both used discs, and some company recently made the first new discs for the devices in thirty-something years.
What are these 'samples' and 'plug-ins' of which you speak?
For me, it's all about the machinery.
I had an Optigan (well, a pile of Optigan bits) many many years ago but never got round to doing anything with it.
The Walkman-powered Mellotron is truly a work of twisted genius. Wonder where I can source 24 walkmans :-)
Many of the original 'Tron sounds can be heard at
http://www.mikedickson.org.uk/tron/
My understanding is Mike now owns the rights for the original tapes.
Thank you
thank you, thank you.
That's my weekend sorted, anyone know how to unstuff the .bin file of the free ellpee on a Mac? my version of Stuffit knocks it back
If you are using an Apple
If you are using an Apple Mac then I suggest you use Firestarter FX which seems to do the trick. Note that burning the file straight in OSX will not work due to bugs with OSX and the use of CUE Sheets.
I don't own the rights to
I don't own the rights to anything to do with the Mellotron - I wisjh I did. My understanding is that the name is still owned by Mellotronics which was sold off some time ago to a chap in Canada. The rights to the tapes is an odd issue as both he and Streetly Electronics issue Mellotron tape sets. However, it has been an issue in the past. Julian Cope tried to use the Spanish guitar phrase found on the Mk II Mellotron accompaniment tapes, which the Beatles also found and used at the start of 'Bungalow Bill'; Cope was advised not to as 'the Beatles probably own that sound'. (They don't)
The issue of the Mellotron and legality and rights and so on has been something that has dogged the instrument since its very beginnings. The Musician's Union famously HATED the thing as it stole work from sessionists (in the days when you could confuse the Mellotron for the 'real thing'). Session players were smuggled into studios to record their 35 notes for the instrument and then hastily bundled out the back door with their session fee.
Anyone keen to hear what a Mellotron can do if really pushed is encouraged to wander off to my web site at http://www.mikedickson.org.uk/mellotronworks where my album 'mellotronworks' can be found, which features a range of classical pieces we all know (honestly..we do!) played on nothing but the Mellotron. And it's all for free too! :-)
Happy listening to you all!
Mike Dickson, Edinburgh
May I bring some modern?
Kelis - Trick Me (the backing rhythm throughout is from a Mellotron)
Radiohead - Lucky (choirs in the chorus)
Garbage - Milk (string pad and the flutes)
Pet Shop Boys - West End Girls (string pad)
I also love a lot of the Moody Blues stuff, Lost In A Lost World from Seventh Sojourn being a good use of Mellotron to do orchestral things.
(EDIT: I just found out that a lot of the orchestral stuff on Seventh Soujourn was Chamberlin and not Mellotron)
The title track of..
In The Court of the Crimson King
This Wheels on Fire - Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll
I also love the Mellotron segment at the end of Flying by the HJH
and not forgetting
2.000 Light Years From Home- Stones
Mind Games - John Lennon
Sitting By the Riverside - Kinks
Julia Dream - Floyd
Mole From The Ministry - Dukes of Stratosphear
In The Wake Of Poseidon - King Crimson
How the Debil!
could I forget "Catch the Rainbow" from Rainbow and the total Mellotron workout that is The Tangs "Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares" from Phaedra
<---- spanks self furiously
Free - My Brother Jake
Possibly the most sparing use of the Tron : a couple of seconds at 1:37 and a bit of a flourish at the end. Given the Heath Robinson nature of the contraption and all the trundling into the studio that went with it this could be seen as a bit of a waste of resources, but the effect is wonderfully uplifting.
Moody Blues - Beyond
The mellotron being pushed to its absolute limits.
I'm not done yet
check out The Strawbs Grave New World and Hero and Heroine
muchos Mello abuse, of the good kind of course
OK...a top eight
01. Epitaph (King Crimson)
02. Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats (Genesis - a band I loathe!)
03. Hung Up On A Dream (Zombies)
04. Mysterious Semblance etc (The Tangs)
05. Le Clochard (Focus)
06. Julia (Pavlov's Dog)
07. Lucky (Radiohead)
08. Starless (King Crimson)