Mellotronists

<< I was surprised to find that they'd brought their M400 along - I've been 
hearing several claims that they've stopped bringing it with them on the road 
for, well, the usual reasons. >>

what are "the usual reasons"? 

my band, with the utmost gratitude to the various owners involved (most 
recently mr moore & mr coulter, whose names & serial numbers will be on any 
document we eventually release of the philly gig) have used seven different m400's on 
stage now. the only problems we've had are these two design flaws (& that's 
my opinion, but bear with me..):

1) there really is no good way to pick a 400 up without getting right 
underneath it- it should've had handles either bolted to or routed out of the ends. I 
always have to remind folks that the slots in the back can't be used to lift 
the thing.
2) the tuning control is /way/ too sensitive to movement; it seems to have 
been engineered to allow easy transposition of the instrument when so often what 
one actually needs to do is nudge the pitch a few cents because the various 
recordings on a set don't intonate with each other or anything else. 
this isn't because they were carelessly recorded but because different 
instruments have different pitch temperaments, & because the various artists 
responsible for the source noises were playing their notes in isolation from any 
musical context; no way for them to lean the pitch one way or another to favour 
the key... 
so we have to do it on-the-fly. does anybody know what the chorists used as a 
pitch reference for their recordings, btw?
 
& people complain that the mellotron is somehow out-of-tune. sorry, but 
that's bollocks. if you play the violin in an orchestra with a load of brass 
instruments, you will intonate differently than if you were playing with a string 
quartet, & differently again with a piano, & you'd do different things in 
different keys too. the mellotron can't adapt like this on it's own so either it 
sounds "out-of-tune" or you keep one hand on the pitch knob. that's why it's so 
near the keyboard.

on my 400, the modified pitch control allows about a semitone either side of 
centre. we aren't clever enough to need to transpose. jimmy, jeff, ken & 
others may have noticed steve & me fighting the tuning a little on the machines in 
philly- this was because of the aforementioned & not any reliability problems 
with the two excellent 400's we were loaned.

in fact, the only gripes I have any first-hand knowledge of came from a guy 
at work who does the monitor mixes for visiting bands. he was once a roadie for 
greenslade & recalled (on the occasion of 1098 visiting mtv back in '96) that 
they were instructed to remove the tapes from dave's 400 before moving it 
anywhere. this process was sufficiently tedious that they would sabotage the 
'tron by forgetting to reload the frame before several gigs.
that's the only "mellotrons are a nuisance" anecdote I can find any support 
for. 
with the excellent support we now have for these machines, there's simply no 
excuse for not gigging them beyond the purely logistical matter of shifting 
them.

anyway, that's what I reckon.

duncan/1098 (the stickertron)