Tape-based Keyboard
Reviews : Keyboard
It's over 40 years since its inception,
but the Mellotron has proved to be surprisingly enduring. We meet the
men who resurrected the original sampler and review the most
technologically sophisticated Mellotron ever, the brand-new M4000.
Photos: Richard Ecclestone
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In 1986, Streetly Electronics went out of business,
bringing to an end one of the most important chapters in modern music.
Streetly were the manufacturers of the Mellotron, the invention of which
ushered in the eras of psychedelia, art rock and progressive rock, all
of which are, in one form or another, still with us today. Depending on
your age and taste, you may wish to dismiss the Beatles, the Moody
Blues, Genesis and Yes, but you can't ignore the fact that Mellotrons
are still among the most highly regarded of electronic keyboards, sought
after by almost every band that wants to step a little beyond the
basics.
As a consequence, even the smallest Mellotrons, the
Model 400s, now command prices in the region of £3000. As for the larger
models — the Mk1, Mk2 and M300 — don't ask; if you need to know the
price, you probably can't afford one. But all have one thing in common:
rarity. If you don't own a vintage Mellotron already, the chances are
that you never will. But does this mean that the Mellotron is destined
to disappear, remembered only on old LPs and in bastardised form in
sample libraries? Happily, no. A new generation of Mellotrons is alive
and well and, just as before, its parents live near Birmingham. This is
its story.
The Rebirth Of Streetly Electronics
The men behind the rebirth of the Mellotron are
Martin Smith, John Bradley (the son of Les Bradley, who helped to
develop the original) and Norm Leete.
Recognising the resurgence of interest in the
Mellotron in the early 1990s, Smith was the force behind the 1993
Mellotron tribute album, Rime Of The Ancient Sampler, which
featured tracks from luminaries such as Mike Pinder (the Moody Blues),
Woolly Wolstenholme (Barclay James Harvest), David Cross (King Crimson),
Nick Magnus (the Steve Hackett Band), Ken Freeman and, umm... yours
truly. The following year, he and Bradley set up Mellotron Archives UK
on a part-time basis to provide service and support to Mellotron owners,
and to supply new tape frames for existing machines.
In 1997, Les Bradley died, whereupon Smith and John
Bradley decided to ditch their day jobs, readopt the Streetly
Electronics name and, in their own words, "give it a go". For 10 years,
they survived by refurbishing machines for existing owners, refurbishing
machines to sell to new owners, and by making tapes and tape frames.
In 2002, Swedish enthusiast Markus Resch brought out a modified reproduction of the Model 400, which he called the Mk6 (see SOS,
August 2002), and he sells a small number worldwide. Similarly, in
2005, Streetly manufactured a one-off glass M400 'Skellotron' and
another, less transparent, M400 on legs. But Smith and Bradley realised
that this was not where the market lay; bespoke instruments were too
time-consuming to build and therefore too expensive to appeal to a wide
market. At this point, I'll let Martin Smith take up the story...
"About three years ago I looked at the order book
and at the diminishing availability of machines that we could obtain to
restore, and I realised that if we didn't do something quickly, we may
have had a business on paper, but we wouldn't have had any stock, and we
couldn't survive on servicing and building tape frames. What's more, I
don't think that we've ever made a profit out of restoring Mk2s because
they always take too long. It's wonderful to rebuild the Mellotron that
George Harrison left in his shed for 30 years, or Paul McCartney's Abbey
Road machine, but they take so much time. And then, when you think
you've finished one, you fire it up, listen, and hear more faults, so
you have to take it apart and start again. So we thought about putting
Model 400s back into production. Unfortunately, Markus had already
brought out his Mk6, which, despite its incompatibility with existing
Mellotrons and Novatrons, is a fairly accomplished machine.
"We then thought about building Mk2s, but this would
have been horrendously expensive and, as John and I discussed things,
the concept turned into a single-manual machine with the Mk2's cycling
mechanism. Then we realised that this would make the new instrument
incompatible with M400s and Novatrons. This was an important point; we
wanted it to be compatible so that the old and the new could share
frames and spare parts. But, at the same time, the new instrument had to
put the 'wow!' factor back into Mellotrons."
How Does A Mellotron Work?
When you press a key, a pinch roller presses the
individual tape beneath it against a continuously rotating capstan, and
the tape is then pulled across a playback head that replays a sound.
There are three sounds running in parallel along each tape, and you move
the head from left to right to select which is played at any given
time.
The played tape falls into a collector box and,
when you release the key, this is pulled back by a return spring, ready
for the note to be played again. The limitation is that, if you reach
the end of the tape, playback stops. Consequently, many people have
asked why strips of tape are used rather than loops that would offer
infinite sustain. The answer is simple: if you know the start position
of the tape when you press the key, you can include the attack portion
and natural decay of each sound.
On a non-cycling Mellotron, each tape is about five
feet long. On a cycling machine, the tape is in excess of 30 feet long,
but is divided into multiple sections, each of which offers a different
selection of sounds. The portions of the tape that are unused at any
given time are wrapped around drums at either end of the mechanism.
The Cycling System
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To understand the difficulties that Smith and
Bradley faced in marrying a cycling mechanism to an M400 chassis, you
have to appreciate that there were two distinct families of Mellotrons:
the M400, its 'Novatron' successors and the Mk5 (on one hand) and the
much larger Mk1, Mk2 and M300 (on the other).
The larger models had much longer tapes, with
multiple sets of recordings positioned at precise intervals along them.
The start of each set of sounds was known as a 'station' and, for
example, a Mk2 might have strings, flutes and brass under the A, B and C
selectors at Station 1, but when you then pressed the '2' button, the
large drums holding the tapes would rotate until station 2 was reached,
whereupon the three playable sounds might have been flugelhorn, tuned
farts, and the massed choirs of the Selly Oak Philharmonic. You could
even blend sounds on these 'cycling' machines by placing the tape heads
between parallel tracks, thus mixing A+B or B+C for even greater
flexibility. Consequently, the six stations on a Mk2 manual offered a
total of 18 sounds and 12 blends. In contrast, the M400s and Novatrons
had just one set of sounds (again called A, B and C), and if you wanted
to change these you had to whip out the tape frame and install a
replacement. This was not something that many were brave (or daft)
enough to attempt on stage!
The M4000's control panel: identical to the M400's,
aside from the addition of four buttons and an LED display to operate
the cycling mechanism.
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Given the problems of building a cycling machine in
the much smaller M400 format, the new Mellotron could have been
stillborn. However, a turning point arrived when Leete suggested that a
smaller and more reliable cycling system could be designed using digital
control rather than the antique sync-tape-and-stepper-motor system
designed in the early 1960s. An expert in writing efficient code for
robot arms, Leete then made the mistake of suggesting that he could
write the program in about six weeks.
"Norm knows a great deal about Mellotrons," John
Bradley explains. "He has a lot of knowledge of motor control systems
and servo motors, so this felt like familiar ground to him. But a
cycling Mellotron presents problems that he had never encountered
before, and it wasn't until he started developing the software that he
appreciated everything that it involved.
"He knew that the motors had to work with pinpoint
accuracy, but he hadn't considered things such as how the customer could
reset it, and how the program could check the physical fail-safes to
stop the tapes being destroyed if keys were pressed while the stations
were cycling. On original Mellotrons, there was a flap that physically
locked the keys while cycling was taking place. Unfortunately, this was
unreliable, and many tapes suffered fatal consequences. In the new
machine, this was to be replaced by a pair of optical sensors that would
stop the cycling motor dead in its tracks if a key is brushed by as
little as an eighth of an inch. In theory, this needs no maintenance and
no adjustment and, component failures notwithstanding, should last
forever.
"Anyway, returning to Norm," continues Bradley. "His
first attempt resulted in the tapes always being a fraction of an inch
away from the stations. So he went away, re-thought the maths that
determined the positions of the tapes, rewrote the program, and, a year
after starting, came back with what we've got now, which brings the
tapes back to the right place every time."
Introducing The M5000
Already in the planning stage, the M5000 will be a
double-manual version of the M4000, just as the Mk5 was a double-manual
version of the M400. It will host 48 sounds, a digital reverb, internal
amplifiers and NXT flat-panel monitoring within the cabinet. In many
ways, it will be an homage to the Mk2, but much lighter, more playable
and more reliable.
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The Tape Transport & Replay Electronics
It was now time to address the mechanics of the tape
transport. The frame was chosen to be a modified Novatron frame, braced
to carry the extra weight of the cycling system. This would provide
continuity with older models, and enable both generations to use a
common list of spare parts.
The most important improvement in the transport was,
perhaps, the least visible. To appreciate it, you have to understand
that early Mellotrons went flat when you played more than a handful of
notes. In part, this was because the motor controller (called the CMC10)
was not quite up to the job. On later models, a board called an SMS2
replaced the CMC10, but new problems arose because the motor pulling the
tapes through the instrument wasn't powerful enough. The situation
wasn't helped by the use of plain bearings, which picked up rubbish,
scarred, and became less efficient as the machines got older. At this
point, I'll pass the story back to John Bradley...
Lifting the lid on the M4000 reveals the keyboard mechanism and a glimpse of the tapes themselves.
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"The CMC10 was not particularly clever," says
Bradley. "It would drift all over the place depending upon temperature,
and the pitch would drop after just six or seven notes. Unfortunately,
these were used on all the early M400s, and the SMS2 only appeared in
1974 when the original Streetly Electronics decided to build a new,
double manual instrument [the Mk5] and realised that the CMC10
would be hopeless at driving a double-length capstan. The SMS2 was a
proper servo-mechanism; a huge improvement. However, if you replace the
CMC10 in an older machine with an SMS2, you get a wowing effect because
of the mismatch; if the motor slows down slightly, the SMS2 ramps up the
voltage and the motor goes past the correct pitch, so the SMS2 drops
the voltage and the motor slows down too much. This behaviour wasn't
good enough for our new instrument so, like Markus did for his Mk6, we
decided to use a more powerful motor that would complement the SMS2.
"In the end, we sourced the capstan motor from the
manufacturers who had made the motors for the M400s," adds Smith.
"Remember, most motors of this sort are designed to do things like drive
washing machines, and we needed something that was far more stable,
with much more torque. So we used a company that understood our
requirements. They came up with a powerful, permanent magnet motor that,
for a given load, draws a lot less current from the power supply."
Other proposed improvements for the new instrument
included rollers at the bottom of the tape loops (the M400s had
non-rotating plastic mouldings), yet more rollers to replace the
stainless steel rod over which M400 tapes pass as they go down into the
body of the Mellotron, and a seamless drive belt designed to eliminate
the faint thump that could be heard on some vintage machines. In
addition, the capstan was to be stainless steel, which can't be
magnetised. The early Mellotrons used brass capstans, which were later
replaced by chrome-plated steel capstans that could become magnetised.
You know what happens when you pass a tape hundreds of times across a
magnet, don't you?
Teaching The Old Dog New Tricks
Streetly have introduced several new Mellotron
sounds over the past five years, including Bass Clarinet, Ian McDonald's
Flute, Russian Choir, 'Watcher', and Sad Strings.
Martin Smith describes the Bass Clarinet as having
"a big farty sound that people love from Mellotrons". Apparently, Harry
Chamberlin recorded Bass Clarinet tapes for the Chamberlin, but they got
lost and thus never reached the Mellotron catalogue.
As an owner and player of many Mellotrons over the
years, Ian McDonald of King Crimson understands how the instrument
works, so he recorded each note in his flute set with the machine's
eight-second limitation in mind. He introduced the note, added vibrato
in an appropriate way and then let the note die away in exactly eight
seconds, which makes these recordings uniquely appropriate to the
Mellotron.
The Russian Choir is not a new recording, but an
amalgam of existing vocal tapes, and has an 'orthodox church' feel.
Likewise, 'Watcher' is not new, but is an A+B mix of the Mk2 Strings and
Mk2 Brass that Tony Banks used on Genesis' seminal track 'Watcher Of
The Skies', which remains among the most often-played of all Mellotron
licks.
Finally, there are the Sad Strings, which were
discovered on a reel of EMI tape that had never been converted into a
tape set. Smith thinks that this is because the recordings weren't clean
enough — they were full of badly bowed strings, chair scrapes and
coughs. But with a little judicious manipulation in the digital world it
was possible to create a 'new' set of tapes that were probably recorded
in the early 1960s!
The Filtron
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Mellotrons have garnered a deserved reputation for
unreliability, and stories abound of instruments with sticky tapes being
thrown into orchestra pits (Keith Emerson) or doused in fuel and
ignited (Rick Wakeman). But a studio-bound and well-maintained M400 is a
reliable machine, so something about the on-stage environment must be
inimical to the design.
A couple of years ago, Henry Dagg, the keyboard
player in the Genesis tribute band In The Cage, identified the problem
and cured it. He found that convection was drawing air through the base
of his M400, sucking in a combination of dry ice and stage smoke that
was then deposited on the tapes, guides and heads, causing them to
become sticky. Cleaning was of only temporary benefit; the problems
returned within a gig or two. So he sealed the lower part of his
Mellotron's cabinet and installed a fan that sucked air through a filter
to pressurise the inside of the instrument. With clean air inside, and
air always being forced out, there was no way for the smoke to get in
and damage the mechanism. The problems disappeared.
Having cured his own instrument, Dagg spoke to Smith
and Bradley, somebody named the fan/filter unit 'the Filtron', and they
all agreed that Dagg would build it as part of the new instrument and
as a retrofit for existing Mellotrons.
The Sounds
Next, Smith and Bradley had to decide on the sounds
that they would install in each of the eight stations in their new
machine. Smith explains. "We've got a library of around 100 sounds, and I
keep a log of every one that we sell. I went back and looked at what we
had sold over the past five years, and selected the 24 that had been
ordered most often. So the sound set was not necessarily going to be a
'best of', but a 'most popular of'."
With the keyboard removed we can see the M4000's tape rack, along with the drums and chain of the cycling mechanism.
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Having selected the sounds, Smith found that it was
not trivial to arrange them into eight groups of three with appropriate
choices in each of the groups. "We wanted to reintroduce blending in the
new machine," he explains. "Some M400s — those that did not use Les
Bradley's tapes — did not do this well because the gaps between the
tracks were too great, and if you tried to blend by placing the A-B-C
selector between two sounds, the volume decreased and the
signal-to-noise ratio suffered. But we were determined to put blending
back, with a blended sound at the same volume as either of its
constituents. This, then, placed significant constraints on which sounds
we could put next to each other if players were to get sensible
results. Having said that, we'll also supply bespoke tape sets. If
people want to choose their own 24 sounds and decide where they sit on
the tapes, we'll create a set for them. If they supply their own sounds
we can create a set from those, but we'll have to quote for that
individually because we've been sent sounds that are almost unusable,
and it can take days to get something worthwhile out of them."
Given the constraints imposed by blending, I asked
Smith whether Streetly had performed any retuning before creating the
masters for the new machines. "Absolutely," he replied. "I know that
there are purists who say that we should have left everything as it was,
but with blending you can't have sounds that are out of tune with one
another. We recently sent out some tuned flute tapes, and everybody said
that they were the best tapes that they had heard in ages, so for the
new machine we decided to tune the sounds just a little; they're not
precise and soulless, but they are much more useable.
With the front cover off we can see the tape return springs and also the Filtron unit at the bottom of the case.
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"I also cleaned up certain sounds. I have always
hated the bias pops, hums, and other unwanted noises on the original
Mellotron tapes so I applied some gentle filtering — perhaps just some
roll-off to eliminate the 60Hz and 90Hz hums on the Mk2 violins, or a
bit of hiss reduction at the top end. Les had always wanted to re-record
the master tapes and, if he had done so, the Mellotron might have
sounded much cleaner from the start. Nevertheless, if there are any
die-hards out there who want the original sounds, warts and all, they
can have them.
"Another important point about the sounds is that we
are still using EMI tape. Modern tape formulations don't sound as good.
This might be a mismatch between the tape and the replay system, but
when modern tapes such as BASF or Ampex are pulled across a Mellotron's
heads, some notes are unexpectedly shrill. When we discovered the
current batch of unused EMI tape, we made a set of tapes, put them in an
M400, and the sound was back to where it always should have been. We
reckon that our current stock will last for 10 years but, unless we find
some more, we have to be realistic and say that it will run out
eventually."
Given the improvements to the S/N ratio of the
tapes, I asked Bradley whether he had been worried that the extra
electronics would undo all their work and make the new instrument
noisier than original Mellotrons. "We decided to use the same replay amp
as in the later M400s, and a Novatron power pack with additional
outputs for the cycling system and the digital electronics. So this was
something that we could be specific about: we would not allow the new
machine to be noisier than the best vintage Mellotrons. It took a lot of
care to achieve this, concentrating on screening and careful wiring,
and even arranging parts of the machine so that they don't interfere
with each other. If you measure the earliest Mellotrons you'll be lucky
to find a S/N ratio of -45dB, but a good Novatron had a S/N ratio closer
to -57dB. So that was the target (which, by the way, we achieved)... A
maximum output level of +3dB and a S/N ratio of -57dB, in line with the
best from the past."
In Use
The new Mellotron — now christened the M4000 —
appeared a few weeks ago, and the pictures in this article show unit
number two, which Streetly brought to my studio for appraisal.
The first thing I noticed about it was its
similarity to the M400. Walk up, switch on, choose tape track A, B or C,
set the volume, tone and pitch, and play. Streetly have even sourced
the same knobs found on the M400.
The second thing I noticed was its height. The M400
has a wonderful, iconic shape, but it's too low to play comfortably when
you're standing, and if you try to sit at it you're unlikely to get
your knees underneath. So, given that the case had to be made deeper to
house the cycling mechanism anyway, Streetly took the opportunity to
make it five inches higher too, which means that the keyboard is at the
same height as a Mk2's, and much more playable.
Ah yes... playability. The keyboard is unlike any
vintage Mellotron I have ever played. Only my rebuilt Novatron and
Markus Resch's Mk6 come close, and I think that it's fair to say that
the M4000 action has some of the 'wow!' factor that Smith wants.
Well-adjusted M400s do allow you to play rapidly, provided you have
strong fingers, but the M4000 almost feels like a synthesizer keyboard.
Remarkably, this has been achieved using standard Mellotron keyboard
parts, slightly re-jigged to make the action lighter and more positive
than before.
In the centre of the control panel there's a
two-character, seven-segment LED display with four buttons (up, down,
cycle and inch) flanking it. Operation couldn't be simpler. If you press
'cycle' and use the up/down buttons to select the station you want, the
M4000 will take you directly to it. I measured the slowest transit
(from station one to station eight) at less than a minute, which isn't
bad. I also tested Bradley's assertion that the cycling will stop
instantly if you touch a key. He's right; it does.
Proud parents John Bradley (left) and Martin Smith.
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'Inching' allows you to advance the tapes slightly
and select the position at which playback starts. This is like cutting
off the start of a digital sample; it makes the attack faster, and
eliminates some or all of the atonal chiff of many acoustic sounds. You
can decide if you prefer the soft attack that is the default position of
each station, or the hardest attack, for faster, more aggressive
playing — or anywhere in between.
So what about the sound of the M4000? It's bright,
clean, artifact-free, and without any of the 'smear' that results from
poor head-block azimuth. Some players wax lyrical about the limited
bandwidth, instability, noise and artifacts of early Mellotrons, and
there are purists who may feel that the new model has been emasculated.
I'm a little torn, myself; I loved my Mk1, problems and all, and while
its sounds were far from ideal, it had immense character. But on the
other hand, nobody ever made friends with sticking tapes, and when I add
together reliability, portability, pitch stability, clean sounds and
sensible tuning, I'm forced to admit that the M4000 is in a different
league as a musical instrument.
Another nice touch worth mentioning is that the
output is muted when the M4000 is cycling, which means that you can use
it on stage and switch between stations without strange noises coming
through the PA. Unfortunately, and this is my only complaint, there's
one thing missing that I would very much have liked to see included: a
half-speed switch. Half-speed was a trick that could be achieved by
modifying original Mellotrons, and it's a standard feature on the Mk6.
It drops the pitch of the instrument by an octave and, with the right
tapes installed, produces a sound like senile ogres trying to learn the
contrabass. In other words, it's huge, deep, and I love it. Come on
Streetly... one more feature, please?
Prices & Distribution
At £5287, an M4000 is not cheap. Nevertheless, its
24 sounds start to look like pretty good value when you compare them
with the three sounds in a beaten-up M400 that might cost you around
£3000 in the current market. Consequently, Streetly have not been short
of enquiries, and even before production began the company had taken a
number of orders.
As discussed elsewhere, Streetly will prepare and
load bespoke tape sets for M4000 owners (at £293 per set), but I think
that the most important addition to any M4000 will be its dedicated
flightcase. Given that most instruments will probably be exported from
the UK, it would seem ludicrous to spend a few hundred quid on crating
that will be destroyed on delivery, when £558 buys you a nice case that
is also perfectly suited to gigging.
A worldwide distribution network is being assembled,
with agents on the East and West coasts of the USA, and another in
Germany soon to be confirmed. Meanwhile, Smith is looking for a
distributor in Japan, the addition of which (he feels) will give
Streetly coverage over much of the Mellotron-playing world.
Conclusions
If you're hoping to find a second-hand Mellotron for
next to nothing in your granny's parlour, and to hand it over to
Streetly to have it returned to its former glory, you're going to have
to wait. Streetly are still refurbishing occasional M400s, but are not
undertaking cycling machines for the foreseeable future. So it seems
that, barring miracles, your only opportunity to obtain a cycling
machine is going to be to buy an M4000. But apart from availability,
what distinguishes the M4000 from other cycling Mellotrons?
Most obviously, there's the playing action. Most
cycling Mellotrons are so badly adjusted that pressing the keys is like
fighting girders. In contrast, the M4000 has something approaching a
'synth' action, and I hope that this persuades aficionados to look a bit
beyond the ubiquitous block chords and the infamous 'tarantula crawling
across the keys technique'.
Next, there are the practicalities. The M4000 is
light and sturdy — for a cycling Mellotron, that is. The previous
cycling machines were neither light, nor sturdy, nor were they reliable;
rather, they were backbreakingly heavy, surprisingly fragile, and
hideously unreliable.
Finally, there's the sound. You may lust after the
thumps, bumps, and pops of sounds that seemed marvellous in 1963, but
that's rosy-pink nostalgia. Now you can have the best of both worlds: a
wide range of usable sounds, all with the instantly recognisable
character of the Mellotron.
But the real crux is that you shouldn't be comparing
the M4000 to an original cycling machine because you'll never get your
hands on the latter; you should be comparing it to a second- (or tenth-)
hand M400 with seven alternative tape frames. Do this and there's no
contest. If you're in the market for a Mellotron, I reckon that there's
only one game in town.
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