Make Keyboards Great Again

[Pete the bean]

This made me laugh. It seems so far from the iconic role the Mellotron played in rock classics. I hope David is OK after being replaced with a real pro in this video. He was killing' it!

 

[video:youtube]

[KuruPrionz]

Ya gotta start somewhere, and they did.

 

It pushed the envelope for the times.

 

Of course, people used to have jobs making buggy whips too...

[Pete the bean]

Eric Robinson " David is not a musician as you know." OMG Poor David will never live up to expectations while married to Eric's daughter. He just helped invent the first sampler ever and he has to listen to that crap!

[KuruPrionz]

I suppose I could pity him, but I don't.

 

I never told him to get all snarled up in that stuff!!!

 

Birds are the original samplers, no? I use to whistle riffs to mockingbirds and they would spread them far and wide. If you could find a quiet place with a significant mockingbird population you could make a heck of a record.

[SamuelBLupowitz]

Birds are the original samplers, no? I use to whistle riffs to mockingbirds and they would spread them far and wide. If you could find a quiet place with a significant mockingbird population you could make a heck of a record.

Depending on how long we have to quarantine in the US, I may need to consider this for my next recording project...

[PianoMan51]

One board to rule them all

And in the parlor bind them.

[pinkfloydcramer]

Birds are the original samplers, no? I use to whistle riffs to mockingbirds and they would spread them far and wide. If you could find a quiet place with a significant mockingbird population you could make a heck of a record.

 

I used to conduct similar experiments with a GF's cockatiel. It would get very excited every day right before the Andy Griffith rerun came on TV, and try to mimic the theme. But it was too brief for it to learn it very well, so being a good whistler back then, I would teach it to the bird after the show went off.

 

I think a forest full of mockingbirds doing the Smoke On the Water riff, or the recorder part to Stairway to Heaven, would freak me out.

[ksoper]

Birds are the original samplers, no? I use to whistle riffs to mockingbirds and they would spread them far and wide. If you could find a quiet place with a significant mockingbird population you could make a heck of a record.

 

Never thought to try this. They're all over my property.

[tonybanksfan]

I love snippets of bygone eras, that was great.

[KuruPrionz]

Birds are the original samplers, no? I use to whistle riffs to mockingbirds and they would spread them far and wide. If you could find a quiet place with a significant mockingbird population you could make a heck of a record.

 

Never thought to try this. They're all over my property.

 

 

At 3am in Fresno in the summertime you can hear them all around you. If you rode a bicycle for 5 miles in any direction you would hear them all the way. There was always automobile noise and other noise too, not a good place for the project.

 

I'd get home from a club gig all wound up and go out into the back yard. After listening for bit, I'd whistle a riff and repeat it until the nearby birds picked it up. It probably spread for miles, like a ripple in a pond.

 

Get some 100' mic cables and you could have natural delay and counterpoint.

We don't have any mimicing birds up here in Bellingham. I'd love to hear somebody do something with it.

[Tom Williams]

Conversely, I have a couple of regular morning songbirds outside my music room that I think I may try to notate and turn into one or more compositions.

[KuruPrionz]

Conversely, I have a couple of regular morning songbirds outside my music room that I think I may try to notate and turn into one or more compositions.

 

 

That sounds lovely. Maybe sneak a recording of them into it?

 

A couple of evenings ago I was out walking, power lines above me. Two crows landed on the lines and barraged me with "caws". It made me laugh.

As I continued to walk the crow that was farthest behind me would fly up a little ways ahead and they continued their joyful racket.

They leapfrogged each other 5 times like that before they let me go, never had birds do that before. It was awesome.

[ksoper]

Conversely, I have a couple of regular morning songbirds outside my music room that I think I may try to notate and turn into one or more compositions.

 

This is what Olivier Messiaen did with birdsong.

 

 

[video:youtube]

[jeffincltnc]

Just for the hell of it, I'm going to sample the part at 1:47 and loop it with some beats.

[Dr Mike Metlay]

I love the Mellotron: its history, its checkered heritage, its ancestors, its off-the-wall siblings, its glorious sounds, the many great records it's appeared on...

 

Would I ever own one? Aw HAYULL naw. No chance. I've worked on them, I've played them when there was no other alternative, and more than a lot of other instruments out there, what we hear on records or see in demo films like this one represented the absolute best of what they could do, without broken tapes, misaligned keys, motor wobble depending on how many notes you held down...

 

I am well aware of my heretic status. I will keep playing Mellotrons in software, every one I can find, and watch the original being bashed around by Geoff Unwin (it's a miracle the tape shuttled as accurately as it did during his fast changes) followed by that lovely Pathé lady on the rooster.

[KuruPrionz]

Just to "odden" the conversation, a friend of mine used to own a Chamberlin. It's sort of the Mellotron's daddy.