What is the Mellotron?
The Moodies were a very big user of the mellotron and it was an intrinsic part of their unique sound back in the late 60’s. It’s a keyboard instrument designed to imitate sounds that you couldn’t get from a keyboard in those days; strings, choirs, flutes and so forth. It works with tape technology; under each key there’s a tape head, a strip of prerecorded magnetic tape and a lot of gears and pulleys. When you press a key, the mechanism runs the tape by the tape head and plays a “sample” of an orchestra playing, say, an E-flat. When you release the key, the tape rewinds. Mechanically it’s absolutely dreadful but it sounds beautiful. For all practical purposes the Mellotron is a sampler; it plays back recorded sounds but it cannot record. The interesting limit is that you can only hold a note for as long as the piece of tape will let you. This maxed out at about 8 seconds, after that it just stopped playing. Mike Pinder’s style of keyboard playing, as lush as it comes across, is actuall
