There's a place for all these instruments, naturally. Once upon a time there was only one way to get Mellotron sounds. Now you can have them for the price of a couple of beers in downloaded form. So now they're everywhere. On your phone.. in your Strawberry Fields musical Beatlemas card..(maybe)
..but so are cars, yet people still build, restore and (presumably in quantities sufficient for survival) buy TVRs..
Markus's new instrument looks great, and anything done with love deserves to do well. My personal view is that calling it the M4000D certainly implies a 'product-range relationship' (for want of a less corporate-sounding term) with Streetly's M4000 and should have had a different designation. They aren't really competing products, people that really want a tape-replay instrument will buy them old and new, Memotrons seem to be doing OK and presumably Markus will sell a decent number of M4000Ds. I imagine that there'll be some sales clash between the last two.. which will be sad because someone has to lose out somewhere. But then.. Moog are doing OK, and Nord,and everybody else with any profile in the synth-making game.. so hopefully everybody gets their slice of the cake for a while yet.
If your band depends on Mellotrons but you really can't take it on the plane for whatever reason.. you'll want the next best thing. And if you're used to Mellotrons- the physical instrument- you'll want something that your fingers think IS one, rather than some sounds on a different keyboard.
so that's where the Memotron and M4000D come in.
so what does the word 'Mellotron' define?
Is it an electro-mechanical keyboard-controlled hand-crafted beautifully engineered multiple tape-replay instrument?
A set of sampled sounds identified by that name to musicians irrespective of the source of the sound?
A brand, a trademark?
All these things. Just as long as everybody knows what's what, as it were..
Love and Scones,
msw. Currently Very Very Cold Indeed!
To: newmellotrongroup@yahoogroups.com
From: atm655@verizon.net
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 08:42:07 -0500
Subject: Re: [newmellotrongroup] Re: M4000 D
Me too, and at the same time!
Woe is me, lol!
Tony
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 10:00 PM
Subject: RE: [newmellotrongroup] Re: M4000 D
Hi David! …..I’ve been called both…probably rightly so…. J
"Eccentrics"? My wife has a not so flattering term for us....
she may be right...
On Nov 30, 2010, at 5:43 PM, Gary Brumm wrote:
>>“I doubt the m4000D will be a big seller , there are only a few eccentrics that would create a niche- I hope it doesn't pull Markus under.”
Tom,
Marcus will probably sell more of the “Ds” than the tape units. At under $2k there will probably be a bigger market than the small “niche”
market of the tape based Mellotrons. I would be more worried about the tape units pulling him under. As to the “few eccentrics” they are all here
on this list !! ….uh that’s a complement guys J !!
Cheers All!! J