King Crimson's 51 Year Old Mellotron - Progressive Rock Music Forum

^Doesn't surprise me. Those things inspire creativity, and McCartney has always has bounds of it when it comes to melody.

"I am so prog, I listen to concept albums on shuffle." -KMac2021

Paul McCartney demonstrates the Mellotron.

Psychedelic Paul wrote:

SteveG wrote:

Perhaps the legs were removed so that it could fit in the car's boot.

It wasn't the size of the Mellotron that was the problem - it was the weight. Apparently, a Mellotron is a very heavy piece of equipment, even when it's sawn in half. Smile

Yup, even the lighter "more portable" M400 weighs about 140 pounds!

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Perhaps the legs were removed so that it could fit in the car's boot.

This message was brought to you by a proud supporter of the Deep State.

Psychedelic Paul wrote:

My sound engineer friend, who worked with the band England, once told me that the band sawed their heavy Mellotron in half to make it portable when touring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_(band)

Honestly I don't see how would that be possible since the cabinet was the housing for the tapes

Mellotron Mk VI MkVI Polyphonic Analog Tape Keyboard w/ Extra Tapes #32941 | Techno Empire | Reverb | Keyboard, Analog, Wood case

Unless what they did was the same that Chris Franke (from Tangerine Dream) did to one of his mellotrons, he replaced the original tapes by closed loop tapes so that the instrument provided an infinite sustain.

It was mentioned in the credits of the album Stratosfear as "loop mellotron".

Well, it's also possible that they transported the tape frames separately and they sawed the cabinet jut for transport.

Edited by Gerinski - December 24 2020 at 04:16

My sound engineer friend, who worked with the band England, once told me that the band sawed their heavy Mellotron in half to make it portable when touring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_(band)

^Yup aware of your book will be picking it up after holiday vacation dude!

"I am so prog, I listen to concept albums on shuffle." -KMac2021

Admittedly this was out in January of this year, but still super interesting in case anyone missed it!:

King Crimson's 51st Mellotron Anniversary

"Fifty one years ago today, the first incarnation of the prog rock band, King Crimson, gathered in a cramped basement space below the Fulham Palace Cafe in London. One of the instruments the band would use that would come to distinguish their early sound was that strange, iconic 60s instrument, the Mellotron.

Keyboardist Ian McDonald was taken by the sound of this instrument as it was employed by the Moody Blues (and on The Beatles' Strawberry Fields) and thought it would work well with the type of lush and orchestral sound the band was looking to create. Later in the year, in the summer of 1969, the instrument would again appear on David Bowie's Space Oddity (played by future Yes man, Rick Wakeman).

Of all of the strange instruments that've worked the edges of popular music (the Theremin also comes to mind), the Mellotron is probably the oddest. Basically an upright organ cabinet filled with tape heads and recorded tape strips that you trigger through the keyboard, the Mellotron is like some crazy one-off contraption that caught on and actually got manufactured.

In this video, Allison Stout, of Bell Tone Synth Works, a synthesizer repair shop in Philadelphia, PA, takes us under the hood of a Mellotron MK1 and how it works. One can only imagine how finicky and prone to breakage touring versions of these things must have been."

Edited by Frenetic Zetetic - December 24 2020 at 00:24

"I am so prog, I listen to concept albums on shuffle." -KMac2021