Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Mellotronists

Yeah...Ken M....where is it....?

Since we have a bunch of new list members, maybe we should revive this
project. What made it bog down anyway? You know....We could do a Rime
Vol. 2, and this will spur on activity for a Vol. 3 closely thereafter,
hmmm?

Vance

I've gone through this already, but I'll do it one more time for those who may have missed it, or are new to the list.

A couple of years ago, I created a website which included pictures and information about my home studio and mellotron related experiences (much like Ken Leonard's site).  At the time, my web hosting company offered huge amounts of file space for free, so I thought it would be a great idea to get everyone to submit any mellotron related tunes they created. I would upload them to my website for everyone to hear (Ken Leonard had showed me how to do this).  Since they were "originals", we wouldn't get into trouble, legally.

This quickly snowballed into a much larger project, the thought being that we could create a CD of the best of these tunes, everyone on the mellotronist list getting a vote.  People on this list offered their services in the form of artwork for the cover, original tunes, and one of our members even offered to make copies of the CD for everyone on the list (he worked in a CD production facility at the time).

Now, I never called this "Rime 2", but that name started going around and it kind of stuck.  I preferred "The Mellotron Project". This was more of an amateur effort (no offense intended) than Rime, tunes were submitted by people like me who are not necessarily professional musicians, just love the mellotron and have the ability to record their playing.  As people would submit things, I would put them on my web site for all to hear, along with the details of the instruments played, mellotron sounds and musicians.  The thought was that we would select the best and record the CD.  This was not meant to be a professional thing at all, and I can only think of one or two tunes which were submitted by a professional musician (the complete opposite of Rime).

Well, as KL put it so well, "life got in the way" for most of us.  I didn't receive as many submissions as I had hoped.  Many people who intended to do a tune (including myself) never got around to recording one.  Hey, it's not easy, when it comes right down to it.  We lost our CD production capability when our production source changed jobs.  My first web host went under, and I changed to another company.  Then ∗that∗ company had a dispute between the two owners, which lead to closing down of the company (right after I had prepaid for a year of service at a now pricey rate).  A third company took over the web hosting, but most of the time the customers were left without service.  After a couple of personal setbacks which soon followed, I decided to just let the project and the website go. 

The upside is that we did get to hear original mellotron song submissions from people all overf the world, at least for a while.  Someone on this list was just asking about the Pink Floyd mellotron?  We had a nice tune on the site from the current owner of that Streetly restored, ex-Pink Floyd MKII (now in Israel), sounding very psychadellic indeed.  Now that I think about it, I miss many of those tunes, like "The Cool Vibe of Asia C", which I think is going to be available on the upcoming Systems Theory CD, from what I hear.  Fritz's terrific stuff was also on there, and I know his CD is coming out soon too.  Sundae Club is another example, same thing.  And I love Roc Burgo's stuff (anything new Roc?), along with many of the other submissions.  So, I guess this wasn't a total waste of time. Hopefully it spurred some people on to record their own tunes.  Maybe we can resurrect it, never say never.  I still have the recordings (starting to feel like Brian Wilson here).  Vance has every right to ask "Yeah...Ken M....where is it....?".  He had the first submission, if I recall, with some nice work on his Chamberlin.  The problem with doing something like this is that it starts out being fun, and then it turns into a situation where a lot of people are expecting something and it turns into work.

OK, so that's the story of "Rime 2".  I no longer have a web site (or the desire to maintain one), so it wouldn't be easy to resurrect it.  I hope that anwers any questions.

Ken M.



I think KL summed it up rather well when he said that" Life got in the way".