At 12:13 PM 5/9/2002 -0400,
kinchmusic@... wrote:
>Back in those early years. I remember getting a bit phased by the 8 second
>limitation of the trons action.(That was before I discovered the wonderful
>art of spidering).
>I was seduced by this highly portable and what I considered to be
>technologically advanced keyboard. You had to feed it, well, if you can
>imagine a 12" see through floppy, and boy do I mean floppy disc. Looking back
>I can see that it was way ahead of its time (mid 1970's). What I didn't take
>into account was that it was incredibly Low-Fi compared to a tron. Yes,
>believe it or not, your favourite machine is in fact remarkably Hi-Fi. If
>yours is not, you need your heads examined. Also, the sounds were missing
>their attack as they were on a continuous loop.
>I ended up flogging it and going back to my first love.
>I owned an Vako Orchestron for about a year. As I recall, it was
>about one fifth the price of a Mellotron, which was what I really
>wanted but knew I'd never be able to afford. So I saved up and
>bought the Orchestron instead. I discovered by accident that you
>could put at least two discs into the thing at once, thereby
>combining, say, strings and choir, though the resulting fidelity was
>even worse. Being quite simple ina construction, it was very
>reliable, and I ended up selling it at a reasonable price. Of
>course, I now wish that I had hung onto it, though unlike tapes, the
>optical discs would be very hard to duplicate nowadays.
Pardon the delayed response, doing some cleaning out of the mailbox...
I bought an Orchestron new from Dave van Koevering in 1978.
I met him at the local music store, and got interested in it.
I too didn't like the 8-second limitation of the Mellotron, plus the horror
stories of tapes unwinding, etc.
He delivered it to me at my house, and I paid him in cash, so he
could circumvent having to pay the music store a commission (!)
It was an A/B model, sort of an A with upgrades, wood exterior, with
a flight case.
It was certainly lo-fi, but certainly reliable. I used it on stage, mainly
for the choir disk, which I used running through an Electro-Harmonix
vocoder. With the right EQ and tape echo, it was pretty effective for
backup vocals and choir.
The whole "laser" thing was a crock, just marketing hype - I don't think
the clear disks with the 'tracks' on them were cut with a laser or anything,
and of course they played back with just an opto-electronic reader
(i.e., a "light bulb").
The choir, strings and pipe organ were about the only usable disks.
Flute was very noisy. Saxophone was laughable.
Can't remember what other sounds there were, if any.
Shortly thereafter, I found a bunch of Optigan disks at a garage sale, all
sorts of cheesy titles such as "Nashville Sound", "Big Band Bash", that
kind of thing.
The keys weren't mapped between the Orchestron and the Optigan,
but found there were a bunch of little musical phrases and rhythms
on the Optigan disks. Once you figured out where these were, you
could string them together and actually play little songs. When things
got slow, I'd start doing these things on the breaks. Then when you
put 2 Optigan disks in the machine at the same time, it got really
bizarre. You could have a polka band and a big band playing at the
same time, or put one disk in upside down so it would play backwards.
Very very strange things indeed.
I had the Orchestron until 1991, and it kept on working right until I let
it go. I don't think I even ever changed the light bulb inside!
I let it go for much much too cheap to a friend of mine, the only other
person around who knew what an Orchestron was (this was before I
was on the Internet).
---------------------------------------------------------
Mark S. Glinsky - Arlington, TX
Email -
glinskym@...http://www.markglinsky.com/ManualManor.html"Be Seeing You...." - No. 6
---------------------------------------------------------