Mellotronists

Hi Duncan and all,

Happy new year to everybody! Sorry for having "gone all quiet"... the last
couple weeks of the year mainly consist of getting pulled in all directions
at once by young children, taking them to the snow, entertaining visitors,
etc. etc. The poor Mellotrons have gone all quite too, sitting peacefully
until such time as I can crawl around in the garage re-connecting the PA
without getting my wife too concerned that I'm not spending enough time
being a dad. But I must keep her happy - she is quite a fan of Mellotrons,
her favorite album of all time is "Photos of Ghosts" by PFM. And my youngest
daughters' (4 and 6) favorite song is "Flood at Lyons" by Renaissance, in
all of its Mellotron mixed choir glory. They force us to play it over and
over whenever we are driving somewhere, sing it in the bathtub, etc. It's
pretty scary. What have I done? To top things off my wife has been very good
to me lately - I got a book called "Analog Days" (yay!) for Christmas, plus
Frank's Mellotron book (double yay!) and for my birthday before Christmas my
wife presented me with (dare I say it?) Minimoog Voyager #231 (triple yay!).
This dual-income thing comes in handy sometimes :) I guess I'd better go out
and play the lottery, cuz I'm feeling pretty lucky right now.

Back to Mellotrons - I've got the urge to buy new tapes from Streetly (hi
guys!) but currently stalled by finances. I had to one-up my wife by buying
her the dream sewing machine she has been pining for, for a price that would
have purchased a Mark VI with some left over (!). This has got to stop. The
Russian Choir is a prime candidate, along with the Ian flutes, and let's
see... what else... hey how about the Ted Taylor choir?

I am about to contact Alfonso in Mexico who desparately wants to purchase an
M400 for his arsenal to support his yearly Baja Prog show. PFM and Focus
will be there this year (coming in March - needless to say my wife is quite
excited by this). So any help from this lovely list in hooking him up with a
'tron would be most appreciated. As it is I suspect that I will be asked to
bring along one or two 400's and hope that border customs doesn't give us
too much trouble.

Fortunately over the holidays I did get the opportunity to dig out some old
vinyl and blast it through the house whilst cleaning. Inspired by recent
Mellotron list discussions this included Il Balletto di Bronzo (who played
at Baja Prog last year) and England's Garden Shed. Thanks for reminding me
guys (and girls)!

Best Regards,

- Gene

M400S #1023
M400S #1213
M400S #1289

-----Original Message-----
From: ferrograph@... [mailto:ferrograph@...]
Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2003 1:23 PM
To: mellotronists@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Mellotronists] stuff



on ian's flute: I have sampled it from my rack, but only so we wouldn't have

to worry about schlepping same to the US.... as it turned out, we could've 
safely installed the "streetly/salley new classic combo" in one of gene's 
machines (gene, you've gone all quiet) but instead we used an alesis s4+
with 
a custom ram-card. if you haven't heard this flute.... it's the one that you

can hear on ITCOTKC. it really is almost as if the flute on the album was a 
'tron to start with, and the tapes have been rediscovered.