What's this keyboard instrument?

[brianrost]

He did use a Lowrey on most of the Soft Machine stuff. They had a lever to the side of the swell pedal that bent the pitch by slightly less than a semitone, and you hear his use that in a few places.

My Mom had a Lowrey with the pitch bender. It was called the “Hawaiian guitar” effect. It also had the “Repeat Marimba” setting that Pete Townshend used to create the backing loop on “Baba O’Riley".

 

[Ben Esparza]

A little intel on the Moody Blues and the "Days of Future Passed" album. Apparently, the orchestra and the band never recorded together in the studio. I can only assume the band wrote and recorded their stuff, met up with the arranger(s) for the orchestra, and the orchestra recorded their stuff. Studio engineering geniuses took care of fade-ins and fade out. The only overdubbing was near the end of the band's recording of "Nights in White Satin" where the orchestra took the song to the end.

Ray Thomas played flute and, I assume, played the multi-harmony flute runs on "Another Morning" or maybe the orchestra overdubbed those flute parts. Another part that may have been either overdubbed by the orchestra or played by Ray Thomas was the multi-harmony oboe parts on "(Evening) Time to Get Away". Otherwise, there was heavy use of the Mellotron for the orchestral parts of the band's tunes on that album. This concept album was definitely innovative for it's time and the band took a big chance on its success or failure.

Any more information on this info or corrections to what I've written here are more than welcome.

 

[Ben Esparza]

Clavioline it is.

 

[turf3]

I remember back when I was in college we had a real active "prog" scene (we didn't call it that in those days), and one guy who was a pretty lousy saxophonist also owned a Mellotron. Once a year we had what we called "Counter Ball" which was the same night as the big homecoming prom and dance - while the sorority Sues and Fratboy Dans went there, the stoners and intellectuals all got wasted and went to Counter Ball where someone rented a basement and bands set up with a light show and the like. At any rate, this guy showed up with his sax (errrr...) and Mellotron (Cool!) and what I remember is that it sounded pretty much like all those King Crimson things, but it also was highly unreliable, kind of held together with duct tape and baling wire, and it kept breaking down. I think by the end of the evening half the notes weren't working, but he did what he could with the remainder.

 

[Ben Esparza]

...At any rate, this guy showed up with his sax (errrr...) and Mellotron (Cool!) and what I remember is that it sounded pretty much like all those King Crimson things, but it also was highly unreliable, kind of held together with duct tape and baling wire, and it kept breaking down. I think by the end of the evening half the notes weren't working, but he did what he could with the remainder.

All I know about them is you could hold a note for only 8 seconds, the spring immediately brought the tape head back to the top once you let go of the key, your had to be creative is holding chords by releasing and hitting on octave of the one you released, you had to be slightly ahead of hitting the note so it would activate, and they notoriously would go out of tune. Because of the out of tune tendency, they had a knob where you could speed up or slow down the tape head to stay in tune. I'm sure the tapes would eventually break due to normal wear.

The sounds were pretty unique because they were usually played through a guitar tube amp versus directly into a board. As bad as these inherent flaws were, those things now sell for some major bucks in the used market.

 

[Michedelic]

All I know about them is you could hold a note for only 8 seconds, the spring immediately brought the tape head back to the top once you let go of the key, your had to be creative is holding chords by releasing and hitting on octave of the one you released, you had to be slightly ahead of hitting the note so it would activate, and they notoriously would go out of tune. Because of the out of tune tendency, they had a knob where you could speed up or slow down the tape head to stay in tune. I'm sure the tapes would eventually break due to normal wear.

The sounds were pretty unique because they were usually played through a guitar tube amp versus directly into a board. As bad as these inherent flaws were, those things now sell for some major bucks in the used market.

The mechanical aspect of it was always the drawback…there are all sorts of stories of the Moodies and Crimson experiencing breakdowns on the road; I don’t know if Wakeman or Banks fared any better.
High vintage prices are just a reflection of their relative rarity, but in the past 20 years or so, a Swedish company brought them back digitally…
https://www.digitalmellotron.com/mellotrons

 

[turf3]

I dunno, I think the appeal of a weird instrument that generates its sound in a weird way is largely from that fact. Take and digitize it and you've just got a sampled sound with tons of wow and flutter.

That said, all I've read about Mellotrons, and the photos I've seen of the internals, would fill me with fear.

 

[Bob_Ross]

The mechanical aspect of [the Mellotron] was always the drawback…there are all sorts of stories of the Moodies and Crimson experiencing breakdowns on the road; I don’t know if Wakeman or Banks fared any better.

Rick Wakeman had notoriously bad luck with Mellotrons on the road, and he has claimed that at some point in the 1970s he took some (or one?) of his remaining Mellotrons out into the middle of a field and set them on fire.
Metal Discovery: Interview with Rick Wakeman - 28th July 2010

 

[Michedelic]

I dunno, I think the appeal of a weird instrument that generates its sound in a weird way is largely from that fact. Take and digitize it and you've just got a sampled sound with tons of wow and flutter.

That said, all I've read about Mellotrons, and the photos I've seen of the internals, would fill me with fear.

But that ultimately was its appeal, its own sound(as opposed to a perfect similation of an orchestral, etc, instrument). That creaky, soundtrack music from a 30’s horror film vibe had its unique thing going on in its own right. King Crimson certainly made use of the creepy results, throughout all of the line-ups of the original run(when the 80’s/Belew version came along, it was a new era of synths and also music for them).

There was the parallel story of the Chamberlin, put to good use by David Bowie in the mid/late 70’s…
Chamberlin - Wikipedia

 

[Bob_Ross]

But that ultimately was its appeal, its own sound(as opposed to a perfect similation of an orchestral, etc, instrument).

^^^This

the thing I love about a Mellotron is that is doesn’t really sound like the instruments it’s ostensibly emulating; it sounds like a Mellotron, period.

 

[turf3]

But that ultimately was its appeal, its own sound(as opposed to a perfect similation of an orchestral, etc, instrument). That creaky, soundtrack music from a 30’s horror film vibe had its unique thing going on in its own right. King Crimson certainly made use of the creepy results...

I violently agree with you!