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Looper's Delight
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--- goddard.duncan@mtvne.com wrote: > true, tim, but you'd be surprised (most players > encountering the mellotron for the first time are) > just how long 8 seconds is in the context of most > music. I think my experience with the mellotron is coloured by the fact that the only one I've ever used wasn't in the best condition and the tapes were a lot shorter than they are supposed to be! I used to record at Fort Apache in Cambridge, MA, and they have two 'trons that they purchased when the Broadway show Beatlemania closed. They use one of the 'trons as a parts supply for the other one. (Owners of the Chain Tape Collective's CD 'Seventy-Five Seconds' <http://www.music.columbia.edu/%7Ececenter/mhl21/ct/ct_75/ct_75.html> have a photo of me playing the working one, replete with a bottle of Rolling Rock perched above the keyboard...) Actually, the state of disrepair that thing was in really did add to the weirdness of its sound in a very good way! > or, of course, you could just buy a sampler.... :-) Yeah, these days when I want a Mellotron sound, I use Soundfonts... > rick wakeman got a bloke called dave biro to help > him with a keyboard design that used NAB carts > instead of the mellotron's 3/8" tapes. This is an excerpt from an interview with Steve Howe in which he describes a practical joke he played on Wakeman and his Birotron: "It was a difficult album to make personality-wise. It was the album where we took Rick's Birotron and he went to the loo while he was doing some overdubs, and while he was in the loo we took out all his eight-track cassettes [from the Birotron] and we put mine in: quadraphonic Seals and Crofts and all these old eight track tapes. So he came back and he said, OK let's carry on; when he pressed the keys he went, what the hell is this? It was like, [sings] 'We may never pass this--We may never pass this--We may never pass this--'. If only he had laughed though, but he got quite cross!" Wakeman claims to have, out of frustration with the Birotron, taken every one of them that he owned out into a field, doused them with petrol and torched the lot. I'm not sure how many units escaped the bonfire, but I'd imagine that'd make 'em pretty rare! -t- __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com