Message I don't know how much studio tweaking was available in 1969, but ITCOTCK sure sounds like they used a lot of reverb on the trons. Also, double tracking probably helped too... Would love to hear from some people who were really there at the time.
For live performances, Ian McDonald used to run his Mark II though a reverb unit that sat on top of the Mellotron. I know this because I remember him slamming it down on the case during "Mars"...
I hope I'm not getting "sacriligeous" here, but to state the obvious:
if it is the 35 "tapes" inside the machine that give the mellotron its
sound... then one should be able to "sample/record" those very tapes on
a state of the art poly-synthesizer/sampler and get virtually the same
sound that is on those 35 tapes. I'm basically a guitar player, and I
don't have a mellotron now, but a band I was in (circa '72) did use
one. If my memory is correct, we ran the machine through a reverb unit
into a Marshall amp. No audio "tweaking" or "Hi-Fi stuff" there...
Given that "live" environment, it's hard for me to imagine that the
tapes inside that "real" mellotron would sound a whole heck-of-a-lot
better "live" than those same tapes sampled by poly-synthesizer would
sound "live".
If this premise is correct, then the recording studio is where the
difference between a real mellotron and a synthesizer/sampler should be
most noticeable; i.e., one has not lost a generation, and one is able
to "tweak" the audio coming out of a "real" mellotron for richer sound.
(I don't know this for a fact, but I bet that mellotron on "Epitaph"
had the hell tweaked out of it in the studio.)
Anyhow, I really like the sound of those real mellotrons!
Thanks,
Galen Niles