Mellotronists

The only one I ever saw was at Kean's house when he lived in Moses 
Lake. It made a BIG, BIG sound! Scared the tar out of me! It was pure 
and loud! I heard only something like eight were ever made, and the 
guy who invented/made them was living the rough life in a trailer 
park in Florida or something like that. Biro is the man!! I wonder 
how he connected with the mere handful of bands that used the 
Birotron.

Oh lord, tronchick, never never never never use "Bi" and "curious" in the
same header on this list.  You've seen what they do to each other here,
haven't you?

Read Frank Samagio's "The Mellotron Book" for more Birotron information, but
it seems the magic ingredient was Rick Wakeman's endorsement and cash that
got the whole thing going.  Weren't there about 20 made, folks?

Jon E Salley
MiloJohnson@...
M400 #886

At 18:31 06/01/03 +0000, mellotrongirl <mellotrongirl@...> wrote:
>The only one I ever saw was at Kean's house when he lived in Moses
>Lake. It made a BIG, BIG sound! Scared the tar out of me! It was pure
>and loud! I heard only something like eight were ever made,

Any idea what serial number it is,, or is this a while back?

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.

Curiously they are numbered 009, 011 and 015 and I can't remember
how 015 got there, I think we might have had production problems with
a couple.  A couple of pictures are at:
http://www.atthepub.demon.co.uk/birotron/

They're not very good, they were taken after a really boozy session
with the friend mentioned above who worked with me on them. We spent
several nostalgic hours remembering the fun we had back then when
he revealed that he had 3 in his garage, so we staggered out with digital
camera and took a couple of pics.

The whole Birotron episode was little more than vaguely organised chaos,
and the story is probably worth writing if only for humour value.

>and the
>guy who invented/made them was living the rough life in a trailer
>park in Florida or something like that. Biro is the man!! I wonder
>how he connected with the mere handful of bands that used the
>Birotron.

I'm trying to get in touch with Dave, and indeed anyone else Birotron
related - I don't have a great deal of time but I'll keep the list informed
if it's not too off-topic - comments welcome.

As far as I can recall the only ones originally actually shipped and played
in anger (yes, in anger usually!) were to Wakeman (of course) and Tangerine
Dream, but what happened to them all, well all 13, is a matter I'm looking 
into.

If anyone knows of any Birotron recordings other than Wakeman's I'd love
to hear about them!



>At 12:49 06/01/03 -0600, JS wrote:
>Oh lord, tronchick, never never never never use "Bi" and "curious" in the
>same header on this list.

Chuckle.


>Read Frank Samagio's "The Mellotron Book" for more Birotron information, but
>it seems the magic ingredient was Rick Wakeman's endorsement and cash that
>got the whole thing going.  Weren't there about 20 made, folks?

This is just about it. Dave Biro approached Wakeman (I think he hassled his way
backstage at a gig) with his prototype which used 20 stand alone automobile 
type
8-track players in a *big* frame. He convinced Wakeman that it was worth 
investing
in and so production was planned to be in High Wycombe, where Wakeman had
a small studio, Packhorse Case Co, and a handful of other small companies.

The original Birotron actually sounded pretty good,
and even the production ones could sound pretty reasonable. In fact given the
circumstances under which they were built I think they were pretty darned good.

To give you a flavour, when we asked the boss (who shall remain nameless)
for a digital frequency counter (pretty essential for designing an electronic
instrument really) he pointed to the (only) little digital mutimeter we had and
asked if we could modify it, when asked for an oscilloscope he looked at 
the ageing
TV that was essential for the Packhorse case guys to watch the racing on,
and mumbled something about an article he'd seen in Wireless World on how 
to convert
your telly into a 'scope back in the 60s.

We possessed the only coffee machine that I know of whose cash box was usually
devoid of cash but frequently contained IOUs on scraps of paper when someone
was short of a quid or two to put on the horses.

It was a nightmare in terms of professional manufacturing but a great laugh.

Must get round to writing it all down.................



Best Regards,

Nic

Birotron #009 still awaiting rebuild :-(

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.

In a message dated 1/6/03 2:24:03 PM Pacific Standard Time, nic@... 
writes:


> At 18:31 06/01/03 +0000, mellotrongirl <mellotrongirl@...> wrote:
> >The only one I ever saw was at Kean's house when he lived in Moses
> >Lake. It made a BIG, BIG sound! Scared the tar out of me! It was pure
> >and loud! I heard only something like eight were ever made,
> 
> Any idea what serial number it is,, or is this a while back?
> 
> 

DK has maintained that his Birotron is #007.  This is the same unit I saw at 
the Bomb Factory studio in Burbank a few months before DK abandoned L.A. for 
Canada.

Frank Samagaio
M400 #908

> > The choir and strings are really frightening," Wakeman gushed

Frighteningly bad, more like. I've heard the masters and they are
actually quite good recordings. The problem is that once they are in the
Birotron they seem to lose all their EQ qualities, possibly because they
didn't have any way of adjusting the head tracking. You can disguise it
a bit by tweaking up the EQ on the mixer (which mostly has the effect of
simply upping the white noise ratio) and reverbing -the hell- out of it,
but that's about it. An A/B between the source sounds and the instrument
shows it up badly.

> > You can program different kinds of attack and sustain

Oh hardly! What passes for 'attack and sustain' are actually more like
'fade in and fade out'. Actual 'attack' simply doesn't exist on this
instrument at all.

> > the keyboard is light; you can play as fast as you like, which you
> > can't do on the Mellotron."

I disagree with this as well. The keyboard isn;t light at all. It's not
a ton weight like the Tron, but it's hardly a Hammond. True, it's
lighter because all it is doing is making a circuit through which the
endless loop can make itself heard, but the spring mechanism that keeps
the keys up seems to be made of coiled steel. Not only is this a bit
tiing to play, it's not made any easier by the key action being very low
in terms of contact; there is a point on a Hammond where the note plays,
beyond which the rest is simply the wire flexing on the busbars. The
action on the Biro (to me, anyway) seemed to be entirely on the bottom
of the playing distance. Horrible!

Mike Dickson (tron@...) M400 #996
The Official Cynic of Streetly Electronics
Streetly Sample Library http://www.blackcat.demon.co.uk/tron/

At 17:06 06/01/03 -0500, NormLeete@... wrote:
>In a message dated 06/01/03 18:32:03 GMT Standard Time, 
>mellotrongirl@... writes:
>
>
>>. It made a BIG, BIG sound!
>
>
>Before you played a note (well with 19 8-tracks rumbling away that is no 
>surprise!)
>
>Norm

Ooh, that's a bit harsh :-) We'd have fixed that but there were quite a few 
other issues to deal with,
and since your posting you've probably seen what some of the issues were! 
Ultimately they were more than
the (small) organisation could resolve - it would be very difficult to 
remedy fundamental design flaws at
that stage anyway, because it was a case of treating the symptoms, we 
didn't have the resource to look at
curing the cause! (Tho' some of us knew it.......................)




.



Best Regards,

Nic

Birotron #009 still awaiting rebuild :-(

At 19:54 06/01/03 -0800, bob.snyder wrote:

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

<snip>

> > The choir and strings are really frightening," Wakeman gushed in a
> > Keyboard interview dated March '76.

This reads very similarly to an article in Melody Maker, July 10th 1976.
I'll try and get it scanned in over the next week or so.


> > 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?

I'm pretty sure this is padding - I recall making the rear panels, where the
mains went in, and stamping the serial numbers - I numbered up to
20, I know that the last 4/5 were never used, we had a couple of oddities
lying around and the first one was not serialed as far as I remember.

I'm pretty certain 13 is the total number of useable, playable(??) machines,
but I must admit that after 27 years memory may play tricks.

What I'll do is stick a page on my web site with the 'known' machines, and see
if my investigations through Rick, Dave Biro et al give any further info 
(I'm not
sure it will:-)

>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

I think this is the one mellotrongirl (sorry - don't know name) referred 
to, and that
Frank Samagaio identified as #007 (Thanks, by the way Frank).

So there's at least 4 accounted for - Rick quite possibly trashed his, a 
couple went to
Tangerine Dream - god only knows what became of those, I think one 
(possibly of those
two) is in a museum (Frankfurt??), but of the others I don't know.

But certainly there were not 30-35. We didn't have enough parts to make 
that many,
and I can't really see anyone forking out to make more later than I was 
involved - Wakeman
had pretty well lost patience, (and money), the invasion of poly moog et al 
was underway,
(not that they're the same thing, but they obfuscated the market) so it's 
very, very unlikely.


Best Regards,

Nic

Birotron #009 still awaiting rebuild :-(