The Mellotron, an electronic keyboard of recorded samples, changed pop music

I remember my dad telling me years and years ago about an arbitrary function generator that they used at university, where you had an oscilloscope with a cardboard mask representing the function's graph in front of the screen, and a light sensor in a light-tight funnel that controlled the spot height. When light shone on the sensor it would reduce the input voltage, and so the spot would trace the top of the cardboard mask.

This actually works quite well!

> Waveforms were drawn on glass plates

Interestingly enough the documentary "Sisters with Transistors" show some British pioneers adopt a similar approach, but drawing on film rather than glass plates, in the 40s and 50s.

A somewhat distant cousin to that is the Mattel Optigan, which used waveforms printed on a transparent sheet of plastic and spun over a photocell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optigan

There is a cool app that emulates it - https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/ans/

> Waveforms were drawn on glass plates

That sounds similar to how the Hammond organ worked, I think. I believe it had spinning wheels with a wavy edge; light shone past the edge of a wheel generated an electrical waveform.

Think this guy Nikolai Voinov from Soviet Union was doing it in 1930. Quite amazing:

https://youtu.be/Z7Zb4rso82M

One could also mention the Birotron. It was a mellotron-type instrument that Rick Wakeman had in the mid-seventies, but instead of the Mellotron strips of rewindable tape, it used 8-track tape housings to hold its tape.

The members of Yes are said to have pranked Rick one day, by swapping out all the tapes for commercial 8-tracks, so when he began to play it was a cacophony of pop songs overlaid onto each other, rather than the appropriate sounds. It's said that Wakeman was quite cross :)

(the instrument is heard on Tangerine Dream's album Force Majeure: strings and male choir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afqgm3CzzQY )

Right? And King Crimson sold one of theirs to Tony Banks of Genesis. At least that's a claim here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellotron I loved its use on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Or Michael Pinder from The Moody Blues. You know, the guy who also introduced the Mellotron to The Beatles?

Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark also used the Mellotron in the early 80s, all over Architecture and Morality and Dazzle Ships.

> But without actually having the confidence or the guts to work with a real choir we had to employ other means of trying to reproduce that massed choral sound, hence the Mellotrons.

For example the Mellotron provided the violin lead and choir background in their single Maid of Orleans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwMhjbThKg

Or Led Zeppelin - The Rain Song.

I'm thinking about the MTBF of Mellotrons, and thinking it's a miracle all 4 band members were able to play together ...

This is absolutely genius. I love it. Too bad I did not know about them before.

https://youtu.be/B7XF3tINSyI

Is that the John Medeski of Medeski Martin & Wood?

I have a couple albums from them I need to listen to again, but he was on a Hammond or piano. I can see this new thing being fun.

Where I used to live, a little north of Glasgow but a little south of Stirling, there was a big flat bit of low-lying ground where a modern housing estate was built, with a nice little stream at the bottom.

The ground was flat because it was the bottom of a loch drained in the 1500s, by a culvert to a river a few miles away.

All the rubbish that people threw from their cars washed down the stream, into the wetlands that it flowed through, and eventually began to gunk up the culvert. The wetlands got bigger, the stream got deeper, and by the 1970s the housing scheme had a nice little pond instead of a stream, and cracks in every foundation.

It's not as bad as the proposed housing scheme further along the valley, where I have a photo (which I can't find just at the moment, sorry) of the developer's 4m tall sign boards just barely sticking out of a pond the size of the entire fenced-off bit.

Don't drain wetlands then build on them, folks. Geology will always win against you.

> I had in mind the omnichord.

...as also used by Bowie in a lovely cover of America, once upon a time.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-bowie-simon-and-garfunkel...

I've always loved using a (simulated) Mellotron when making music, without being consciously clued in to which songs first got me hooked on it, but you've just made me realise it was Dinosaur Jr, not Strawberry Fields Forever. Thanks!

Isn't it all Steven Wilson playing the mellotron on Opeth records? Damnation is one of those albums where if you hear a song from it, the whole thing is getting played.

Super cool, love it!

Or most Van Der Graaf Generator songs. eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDDf_SuAlBA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Plague_of_Lighthouse_Keepers)

A as musician, technologist, and sample user of many years I disagree.

Your usage of sample is correct, but there are other usages of the word which are alos correct, and the term "sampler" isn't specific to the literal digital signal sampling.

I have bought and made plenty of sample packs, to be played back by various sample players, over the last 25 years. A "sampler" refers to how the device works with recordings, not the individual digital samples that it makes up- as far as I understand it anything that allows you to recontextualuze short recordings is a sampler,

A mellotron very much is a mechanical sampler, though very limited compared to its current digital counterparts.

I am open to being wrong. But your claim is a bit odd. While I'd be stoked to see some evidence in the philology of the term that says I'm wrong, I just don't think that is something you'd find.

I don’t think sample really implies it has to be digital at all. “Sampling” can mean what you said, but I think a mellotron is very much a sampler by most definitions. It plays back a chunk of a pre-existing recording.

Why does it have to be digital? A sample is a small portion of a whole, digital, analog, regardless of the medium.

These are recordings of a sample of parts from instruments.

Sampling in the analog world happened for millennia before computers. It's a perfectly good use of the word here. It does not in anyway only apply to digital.

The term sampling is used in DJing and music production for a short “sample” of a whole, long before digital recording technologies were used. You’re too ridgid in your definition. (I am also surprised why this specific “well akshully” comes up - it’s not like DJ sampling or hip hop sampling is obscure.)

I'd say the part of a sample being "a digital representation" is correct, however there's a fun exception to that rule: circuits called bucket-brigade delays that perform "analog sampling", using capacitors. They're still used a lot in musical contexts.

Those are traditionally regarded as being analog, although in recent times I've seen people claiming they're not, since they use discrete instead of continuous signals. So they're kind of halfway.