Mellotronists

Nic Lewis wrote:

>I worked on building them, not design so don't flame me for their
>peculiarities (err, I mean failings). We made 13 excluding Dave Biro's
>original, a while back I tracked down 3 in a friend's garage
>in rather a sorry state, I've got a project to rebuild at least 1 of them.
>  
>

This is from Mark Vail's 'Vintage Synthesizers':

> The choir and strings are really frightening," Wakeman gushed in a 
> Keyboard interview dated March '76. "It uses eight-track tapes 
> arranged in loops so there's no eight-second sustain limit like on the 
> Mellotron. You can program different kinds of attack and sustain, and 
> the keyboard is light; you can play as fast as you like, which you 
> can't do on the Mellotron."

> Three years later, however, the instrument was still in the beta-test 
> phase. "It's my fault that the Birotron didn't come out," Wakeman 
> admitted in the February '79 Keyboard cover story. "The last thing I 
> wanted was an instrument that was rushed out. I don't mind having the 
> teething problems to deal with myself, but I don't think it's fair to 
> have other musicians paying for instruments and then having to deal 
> with the teething problems." At the time there were "30 to 35 working 
> models" in the world by Wakeman's count, and there certainly haven't 
> been many more since.
>
Nic, was RW padding the tally or is it possible that there are more?

Fwiw, there is one in the Audities Collection which I believe is Dave 
Kean's. See 
http://www.audities.org/index.htmlhttp://www.audities.org/index.html

There is a fancy Flash based thingy for viewing the instruments. You can 
zoom in on the Birotron control panel. Lot's of other cool instruments 
there too, but the site is far from finished. (How long they been 
working on this thing?)

Bob S.