Mellotronists

On Sun, 22 Apr 2007, Doug Berg wrote:

> > Hi Mark   Need to mention this is just one person's opinion so for
> what it's worth:
>    Solos, yes, ,and off the top of my head King Crimson's Lizard Lp
> is packed with tron leads, most of the Tron work of Passport,
> Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express, come to think of it Neptunes which
> I believe also uses the M-tron.



not to pick nits, but kraftwerk's TEE is actually an orchestron, and
not a mellotron. see:
http://www.optigan.com/tidbits.html#6

it's an easy one to mistake for a mellotron, and for years that's
what i thought it was also. another is popol vuh's "Aguirre". it
sounds like a mellotron choir, but it's some oddity called a
"choir organ" or something like that [or WAS it?]:

The music sets the tone. It is haunting, ecclesiastical, human and yet
something else. It is by Florian Fricke, whose band Popol Vuh (named for
the Mayan creation myth) has contributed the soundtracks to many Herzog
films. For this opening sequence, Herzog told me, We used a strange
instrument, which we called a 'choir-organ.' It has inside it three dozen
different tapes running parallel to each other in loops. ... All these
tapes are running at the same time, and there is a keyboard on which you
can play them like an organ so that [it will] sound just like a human
choir but yet, at the same time, very artificial and really quite eerie.''

this same sound seems to turn up on a number of german prog albums. makes
me wonder if it was in a studio that a bunch of these bands recorded at.
conny plank had a mellotron in his studio, and that turns up time and
time again on different records.

sorry... drifting off-topic for this thread...

...jeff