Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Mellotronists

The M400 tapes which MK1/124 orig. possessed (Gordon's custom set from 1982?),
has dropouts on  tapes 1-4 on left-hand keyboard,and 31-35 on right-hand keyboard

Yes, I could see how that would happen.  Since I did the RH side, I had to worry about replacing tapes 31-35, since they are near the RH magnet.  Luckily for me, Bob gave me the warning, and by the time I got to tape #31, I pretty much knew what I was doing.

Unfortunately, Bob was working on his LH side keys, which has the magnet next to tapes 1-4.  Replacing tapes, you move from left to right.  Bob had no warning (he started before I did) and his very first tape spilled out and landed smack on the magnet.  Sure enough, when he played his tapes, there was about 3 seconds of missing audio on tape #1.  Martin came to the rescue, though, and is sending him a replacement tape.

I actually covered my RH speaker magnet with a large, plastic popcorn bowl for the last few tapes, just to make sure.  That did the trick.

Another thing I did was to set up my video camera in back of the MKII and attach it to the TV (off to the side at eye level) so that I could visually monitor the tape loop length in the back as I worked replacing tapes from the front.  KL really liked this idea, so did I, and it worked great.  This is really a two man job, but can be done by one if you use some of these tricks.  It was quite an operation ;-).

Regarding the cycling, Martin's tape replacement method provided a way to bypass the timing issues. I replaced each tape by attaching the new tape to old, and pulling it through the tron, using the existing tape as a guide.  This way, I didn't have to take off the cycling chain or the drums.  That probably would have been a nightmare to adjust afterwards.

The only slight downside to this, is that I had to cut the original MKII tapes at Bank #1.  I had initially planned on keeping the original set to possibly use in my M400
(after all, this is 6 tape frames worth of sounds).  I did keep all the tape, winding it back on another reel.  I can use banks #2 - 6 in my M400, but I'd have to somehow use the synch tape to mark where to cut the tape banks and identify the sound starts on each tape.  In reality, this will probably be more trouble than it's worth, but I kept them just in case.


Ken M.