Originating in Berlin, these were the first keyboards to replicate the sounds of other instruments. The premature models started with the idea of the early organs, with a foot keyboard as well. Any sound could be reproduced and played. David Nixon was one of the guys that helped Harry Chamberlin, an organist and electronics enthusiast, develop the keyboard instrument known as the Chamberlin. Harry is the father of all modern sampling. Harry started by tape recording big band instruments holding out different notes for 8 seconds, and this is how he started developing the sounds that would go into the keyboard. Loops lasted for 8 seconds because that is quite a long time for a player to actually play a note on a brass instrument with only one breath. Harry knew that it was already easy enough to make loop playbacks, and wanted to figure out how these loops could have attacks. If they were just loops with no attacks, it would be extremely difficult to tell where you were in the loop or song. Being only a loop with no attack, the loop wouldn’t restart when a key was re-depressed. He achieved this by playing a single piece of tape that had a starting and ending point, and began applying the loops to drum machines early on. The Chamberlin was to be seen as a home entertainment device, and placed in salons as well. Some models of the Chamberlin were released in 1948, ’51, ’59, ’60, ’61, and ’62. A man named Bill Franson offered his services as a salesman for Harry and the Chamberlins. Being unethical, he stole 2 of them. He took them back to England and solicited the Chamberlin as his own creation, even replacing the emblem that said “Chamberlin” to “Franson”. Bradmatic was the company responded to Franson’s advertisement in the newspaper, and they didn’t ask for prints from the development of the instrument. Instead they were focused on capitalizing on it. They presented the Mellotron as a rich man’s toy to add appeal to the instrument for a sales kick. Harry didn’t hear from Franson for a year, and the people who ran the Mellotron corporation were shocked to find out (while attending the NAMM show and seeing the Chamberlin) that the originators of the so-called “Franson” were someone other than Bill Franson. They made a compromise with Harry. They would sell Mellotrons in Europe, while Harry would sell in America, and he would get a percentage of all of the sales. The Mellotron though had crappy action when it came to the attack of the key. The Chamberlin was much smoother on the initial attack. A convenient thing about the Mellotron is that it has replaceable sound cartridges, where you could buy a string, horn, piano, or many other instrument sound cartridges. The Chamberlin unfortunately had fixed cartridges, so users were stuck with the original sounds whether they liked them or not. People would want to find out where these sounds come from when they saw a performance live. They wanted to know what actual instruments were being used in the Mellotron. How the Mellotron works – when you press down on a key, there is a cartridge inside with a tape loop on it that would play over a playhead when the key was depressed. Sounds were credited as “Mellotron” sounds rather than the actual type of instrument that was sounding because that was the emblem seen on stage by the audience. Mellotron built their own custom monitoring systems, and the Chamberlins used an old radio preamp. The Chamberlin used a mechanical lever, while the Mellotron used push buttons to change tones and timbre. Mike Pinder, a tester for the Mellotron, and a member of The Moody Blues ended up using the Mellotron in the band. Pinder saw the Mellotron as a filler inbetween vocal lines. Rod Argent from The Zombies got hold of a Mellotron, that the Beatles had actually left onstage, and began using it in their band! That’s way awesome. Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick used the Mellotron to write orchestral arrangements, because he and pretty much no one wanted to shell out the money for an entire orchestra when all the parts could be recorded, and loaded onto a cartridge that would then be placed inside the Mellotron. In 1963, ’64, ’68, and ’75 various Mellotron models were released. The double keyboard model was the popular one in the 1960’s, and was actually one of the models that Franson had taken to England.
Brian Kehew, Don Lawson, Fabio Frizzi, Mattias Olsson, David Kean, and Geoff Unwinn are some other composers/producers that used the Mellotron. Al Kooper believes there are 2 reasons to buy a synth - to replicate the sounds of real instruments, and to play sounds that people can invent on. Patrick Moraz used the Mellotron like a sampler, and wasn’t concerned about pitch. He sampled his own loops in a sequence of half steps that determined the order. It is said the Mellotron has a more mid-FI characteristic than the Chamberlin, and artists claim it gives a creepier sound to the instrument. Prices were around three or four hundred dollars, and later in the 1990s you had to pay thousands for a Mellotron that may very well be in bad condition. Michael Penn (Sean Penn’s brother), believes that the Chamberlin is significant to how people make records today because much of the sampling originated from this instrument, and Harry Chamberlin himself. The instrument didn’t receive very much wide spread use, and it is similar to the Theremin in that it was partly created for recreating pieces written for orchestra. There is not much reliability in the mellotron. Motors would drone until the instrument warmed up. It was a tempermental instrument. It would go out of tune if too much power was already being used up and there wasn’t enough to feed it. The biggest problem seemed to be how the Mellotron was handled in transit and weather. On tour, it sits in a truck over night, condensation would build up on the tapes and there would be water on tapes for the next gig. They’d plug in the Mellotron and tapes were dysfuncional. The entrepreneurs really narrowed down the market because few people were interested in such a complicated home entertainment device. This is ironic because Harry made a great product but it didn’t do well in the market. Harry’s business never expanded because after it being around for 15-ish years, the business still remained in a small warehouse that still looked like a startup company. He should have looked to investors, and other people to update sounds regularly. The Musicians Union saw that since its invention, anyone could use the Mellotron regardless of their musical skill (or lack there of), in which this started to cause issues because it started to put string players out of work. It did not make a profit and didn’t sell enough, and supply was much greater than demand. Eventually they changed the name to Novatron. David Biro, in 1974, invented Birotron because he didn’t like the sound of the Mellotron, and also didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars for an unreliable instrument with sounds that he didn’t think sounded very good. He looked for an easier, smaller, cheaper way to create it. Only 17 Birotrons were made. David Kean was looking to buy out Mellotron, and needed the master tapes from the Chamberlin for the original sounds, and ended up getting them through Les who took part in running the Mellotron company. New synths were becoming polyphonic and that put the Mellotrons out of work because they were only monophonic. Tony banks replaced his use of the Mellotron with vocodors and other synths, because the Mellotron limited the fact that he had to play a whole set. The Mellotron weighed 450 pounds, was inconvenient for tour, and people eventually began to stop using Mellotrons because they were becoming the generic sound and everyone was using them. M-audio released the M-tron plug-in that includes the classic sounds of the Mellotron. Markus Retsch provided sounds for the modern day Nord keyboards made by Clavia. The Chamberlin and the Mellotron introduced and preceded the many synthesizer keyboards and sequencers we have available to us today. It’s pretty amazing to think that the very keyboard I have at my home, an M-audio Keystation Pro 88 MIDI controller with faders on it, back then could have been seen as a futuristic keyboard.
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