White Keys and Black Keys

When, on February 17, 1967, the double single "Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever" hits record shops, much of the British public has its first encounter with a sound never heard before: it's a flute, yet at the same time it isn't – it's muffled, more enveloping, and above all polyphonic. The chords that open the second track introduce the world to the Mellotron, the keyboard that, fifteen years ahead of the first digital samplers, allowed pop artists to recreate on their own the sounds of an orchestra or any other combination of instruments.

The article that follows closes out the first phase of the "White Keys and Black Keys" column, the one devoted to sounds that predate the synthesizer. The five installments published so far have tried to bring order to the stories and secrets behind some of the keyboards without which pop and rock wouldn't have been the same: besides this one, the others are devoted to the Hammond, electronic organs, electric pianos, and the Clavinet. On the Mellotron there is already an extensive feature, which traces some of the instrument's most significant uses through a track-by-track guide. Compared to the other entries, then, this article will take a more narrative approach. As we'll see, there's certainly no shortage of stories to tell.

The origins of the Mellotron are worthy of a spy story. It's early 1962. A sales rep vanishes without a trace, without a word to his employer, Californian instrument inventor and builder Harry Chamberlin. The rep's name, Bill Fransen, resurfaces later that year in an ad placed in a local Midlands newspaper, along with a British contact address: Fransen is looking to buy seventy tape playback heads. Intrigued by the scale of the request, brothers Frank, Les and Norman Bradley – owners of the electronics firm Bratmatic Ltd. – get in touch with Fransen, who explains that he has arrived from the United States with two prototypes of his own invention: a keyboard instrument that, by playing back pre-recorded tapes, can emulate the sound of an orchestra or any other instrument.

The brothers can't meet Fransen's needs directly (they had patented a system for producing high-quality tape heads, but had just sold it to British Sound Reproduction), but they find the instrument promising and are keen to improve it, manufacture it, and bring it to market. They bring in as backers BBC presenter Eric Robinson and his son-in-law David Nixon, a television personality, launching the new company Mellotronics, based in Streetly, near Birmingham. Thanks to their media profile, the two also act as promoters for the new instrument, which, on Fransen's suggestion, is christened the "Mellotron."

What the five Englishmen don't know is that the keyboards Fransen brought across the ocean are not prototypes of his own invention at all: they are commercial units of the Chamberlin 600, the sixth model of the instrument developed by Harry Chamberlin starting in 1949, and available to American buyers since 1956. Fransen has duly taken care to strip them of the company's logo before showing them to the Bradley brothers.

The deception works partly because, despite having been on sale for some time, the devices are anything but well-engineered: the tape heads are of poor quality and all the internal mechanisms are anchored to the wooden case, which flexes with changes in temperature and humidity, making the instrument's tuning thoroughly unreliable. The Bradleys add an internal frame and source their own tape heads from British Sound Reproduction: now the instrument is sturdier, and the audio quality is superior. With the support of Robinson, co-owner of London's IBC Studios, they re-record all the tapes: apart from the single "3 violins" voice, the Chamberlin's Forties-style sounds felt far too dated. When, in 1963, they launch the advertising campaign for the Mellotron Mark I, they are convinced they have a product with no equal on the market – which, in terms of quality, is actually true, but certainly not in terms of originality.

It's not until 1965 that word of the plagiarism reaches Harry Chamberlin, who finds a Mellotron Mark II on display at a trade fair. The ensuing legal dispute with the Bradleys is settled in a surprisingly amicable agreement: convinced of the brothers' good faith, Chamberlin agrees not only to let the Mellotron remain on the market, but also to allow them (upon payment of appropriate royalties) to keep using the "3 violins" sound recorded for the Chamberlin. Above all, however, the two parties agree on a territorial split: in Britain, only the Mellotron can be sold; in the United States, only the Chamberlin. On paper, Chamberlin has secured the bigger slice of the pie, but the instruments' limitations and the differing evolution of the two main anglosphere scenes will overturn what once seemed an inevitable outcome. Over more than thirty years of activity, Chamberlin production will amount to roughly five hundred units: the most widespread Mellotron model, the M400, will alone be responsible for at least three times as many sales.

The Mellotron and the Chamberlin share the same operating principle, which makes both instruments unique of their kind. Each key on the keyboard corresponds to a magnetic tape, a pair of rollers, and a playback head. Pressing the key brings the head into contact with the tape, which is set in motion by the rollers. The signal from the head is then sent to an amplification circuit, which, connected to a speaker, produces the sound. Releasing the key triggers the tape to rewind, thanks to a spring-loaded mechanism.

Over the years, the number and format of the available tapes would vary considerably; what stayed constant, however, was the length of the recorded segments: eight seconds. Once that time elapses, playback stops and the instrument produces no more sound. The player must either change note, or, alternatively, wait for the rewind to strike the same one again.

The eight-second limit, with its need for rewinding, and the slow response to pressing and releasing the keys are the factors that most shaped musicians' stylistic choices. Extended sustain is impossible; so are rapid passages. The ideal use of the Mellotron and Chamberlin is therefore to build background textures, made up of blocks of sustained notes that blur into one another, smoothing over the keyboard's technical constraints. Thanks above all to the abundance, among the pre-recorded tapes, of warm, enveloping timbres, the sound of the Mellotron and Chamberlin would become the forerunner of a category now ubiquitous in the world of synthesizers: the atmospheric pad, capable, through its slow evolution, of shaping the mood of entire musical genres.

From the Living Room to the Stage

Another trait the early Mellotrons inherited from the Chamberlin was their intended purpose: they were conceived as instruments for beginners, aimed mainly at home use. The promotional materials circulated shortly after launch presented it as the ideal choice for non-musicians wanting to impress guests and acquaintances by effortlessly playing scores with full orchestral sound. Its retail price, £1,000 - roughly €20,000 today - carved out a market made up of jet-set celebrities and exclusive private clubs: among the first buyers were Princess Margaret, the King of Jordan, actor Peter Sellers, and novelist and Scientology founder Ron Hubbard.

Both the Mellotron Mark I (1963) and the later Mellotron Mark II (1964) feature two 35-key keyboards: the left one is split into "rhythm" and "fill" sections and allows the playback of pre-recorded percussion patterns and simple instrumental riffs; the right one (the "lead section") instead assigns single notes to keys as on an ordinary keyboard, and is used for solo parts. Each of the two keyboards is paired with a bank of 35 tapes, 42 feet (12.8 m) long and 3/8 of an inch (9.5 mm) wide; lengthwise, the tapes are divided into six recorded sections separated by silences; within each section, three instrumental tracks, laid 1/8 of an inch apart, correspond to three distinct "voices" of the instrument. A slider lets you speed up or slow down tape playback: at the standard speed of 7.5 inches per second, each pre-recorded sound lasts just over eight seconds; speeding it up shortens the sound and raises the pitch of the note played, while slowing it down lengthens it and lowers the pitch.

The voices are selected via buttons on the front panel: the six that control the active section respond slowly, since they require the tape to rewind; switching between the three voices within the same section, on the other hand, is instantaneous. Once the instrument began catching on with professional musicians too, many replaced the left keyboard's accompaniment banks with additional lead banks, in order to double the number of solo voices available at once.

The Mark II is essentially an upgrade of the Mark I, adding a transistor amplifier, speakers and a mechanical reverb unit. About 300 units were made, but it's estimated that nearly all of the roughly fifty Mark I units produced were sent back to the factory to be upgraded to Mark II spec. The sound of the Mark II is the sound behind the most famous uses of the Sixties and early Seventies: Beatles, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, Traffic, King Crimson, Genesis, Manfred Mann... To these should be added the BBC's use of the instrument, which had Bradmatic build around sixty units branded "FX Console", improved for audio quality and employed for sound effects in radio broadcasts.

Despite its popularity, using the instrument live remained rather impractical: the Mark II weighs around 150 kg, is extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and humidity, and constantly risks losing tape alignment and tuning during transport. The instrument's live unreliability became legendary, with bands forced to halt performances for tens of minutes while technicians got the Mellotron - essential to the songs' sound - working again. Against this backdrop, the Moody Blues held a genuine trump card: their keyboardist Mike Pinder, before forming the band, had spent a year and a half working for Bradmatic/Mellotronics as a tester, giving him an unmatched grasp of the instrument compared to any other artist of the era.

Recognising the growing interest from pop musicians, the Bradley brothers decided to develop models better suited to this new market. The first was the Mellotron M300 (1968, £871), with a single 52-key keyboard (3 keys for diminished chords, 12 for fills, 3 for rhythm patterns, and the rest for solo voices), 1/4-inch tapes, and a mass of just 113 kg. The available sounds were also given a makeover: of all the Mellotron models, the M300 is the only one without the classic "3 violins" voice, offering instead a brighter string sound that, depending on the tape bank used, corresponds to either a single violin or two violins in unison. Generally not much loved, this timbre was nonetheless used extensively by Barclay James Harvest, who kept bringing the M300 on stage even after switching to the next model, in order to reproduce the sound of "Mockingbird" and their other most iconic songs.

The M300 was also not particularly successful, due to the poor reliability of its magnetic heads, and production ceased in 1970 after roughly sixty units. It was immediately succeeded by the M400, by far the best-selling model, the most widely used and the longest in production. Designed explicitly for live use by pop ensembles, the M400 is considerably lighter than its predecessors (55 kg), holds up better to the stress of transport, and has a single 35-key keyboard entirely devoted to solo voices. The new model has no built-in amplifiers or speakers: in professional settings, each musician would rather use their own. Instead of heavy 18-voice tape banks, moreover, the M400 uses 3/8-inch tape frames six feet long, carrying just three voices side by side: swapping frames takes only a few minutes, but in practice many bands stuck with a single frame out of convenience or laziness - the most common being the one sold with the instrument, which includes (in order) the "8 pc. choir", "3 violins" and "flute" voices. Switching between voices is done via a three-position rotary selector next to the keyboard. The launch price of £795 was far more affordable than the Mark I/II, and sales took off: between 1970 and 1977, Streetly Electronics (the Bradleys' newly registered brand) produced roughly two thousand units!

Other models built on the M400's success, adapting it for more demanding customers. The 400FX once again catered to the BBC's needs and came with various frames of noises and sound effects; EMI's studios also took an interest in the instrument and produced their own version (EMI M400) under licence from the Bradleys. The M400SM arrived in 1973 and solved a long-standing problem with earlier models: when too many keys were pressed at once, the motor driving the tapes would struggle, slowing down playback and consequently dropping the pitch; by introducing a servo motor (hence the letters S and M in the name) that only kicked in on extended chords, the new model curbed this annoying flaw. Finally, in 1975 the Mellotron Mark V made its debut, once again with two keyboards, this time both dedicated from the outset to solo voices: reportedly born out of an idea from Rick Wakeman, the model was produced in about thirty units, presumably aimed at Mark II nostalgics.

Sounds and Tricks

Besides the standard ones, Mellotronics/Streetly offered dozens of tapes that could be combined into custom banks and frames to expand the sound range of one's instrument. A frame for the M400 cost £195. Some of these options were used very frequently, others quite rarely: in the sidebar, a list of tracks chosen for featuring one sound or another lets you hear the most iconic timbres firsthand, and, for the curious, a few rarities as well.

There's no shortage of anecdotes and trivia tied to individual sounds: in one note of the famous "3 violins" you can hear a musician's chair creaking; the "trombone" voice, occasionally used by the Moody Blues, was recorded by Mike Pinder himself while he was working for Mellotronics; part of the low octave of the "cello" voice is actually a double bass, because the session musician hired for the recording (Reginald Kirby, who also played cello on "Eleanor Rigby") refused to detune his instrument too drastically for fear of damaging it.

Another option was to commission tapes with one's own custom sounds: by sending Mellotronics/Streetly recordings in 1/4-inch format, the company would transfer them onto 3/8-inch tapes usable with the Mark I/II and M400/Mark V (alternatively, the much-derided M300 allowed you to fit your own 1/4-inch tapes directly!). Some of these custom sounds were added to the official catalogue in later years: thanks to this, we now know not only the identity of some of the service's clients, but also the occasion for which the sound was used.

Special mixes were ordered by Patrick Moraz (during his time with Yes), Frank Zappa, and Split Enz. Roxy Music loaded the orchestral part of "A Really Good Time" onto a frame, so they could reproduce it easily live. Tangerine Dream had three tapes made of sounds from the monophonic Arp Pro Soloist synthesizer, so they could use them polyphonically on stage. Perhaps the most curious use, though, belongs to serial experimenter Dick Hyman (already encountered in our piece on electronic organs): while working on a soundtrack for a television broadcast, he composed a score for barks, yelps and whimpers, assembling a two-and-a-half-octave chromatic scale of dog sounds, recorded to tape and duly sent to Streetly to be transferred to 3/8-inch.

The "Watcher Mix" commissioned by Genesis has a more complex story behind it. The intro of "Watcher Of The Skies", recorded in 1972 on the Mellotron Mark II previously owned by King Crimson, uses three different voices at once: on the left keyboard Tony Banks has a "bass accordion", and on the right a mix of the "brass" and "3 violins" voices. The Mark I/II's button panel, in fact, also allows you to select a combination of two adjacent voices, by positioning the heads straddling two parallel tracks on the magnetic tape.

When, the following year, Banks switched to the more reliable M400, the possibility remained: by setting the rotary selector halfway between two sounds, the coveted mix could be recreated. Here, though, the "brass" and "3 violins" recordings turn out to be slightly out of tune with each other, producing a sound far removed from the grandeur the piece demands. The keyboardist therefore contacted Streetly and had a custom tape made: the left-hand octave carried the accordion, while the remaining notes held the "brass" and "3 violins" mix re-recorded from his own Mark II.

Mixing two sounds together wasn't the only "trick" musicians used to expand the instrument's possibilities. The most skilled players got around the eight-second limit by lifting and releasing, one at a time, the fingers involved in a chord, giving the tape time to rewind while at least two notes kept sounding (a documented example is in Genesis's "Can-Utility And The Coastliners"). The tuning knob, originally meant to compensate for the instrument's tendency to drift out of tune, was exploited by artists like Moody Blues and Traffic to introduce dramatic pitch bends into their performances: you can hear it in "Hole In My Shoe" right before the spoken section, or in "Legend Of A Mind", in the middle part. Pushing the slider all the way down halved the tape speed, dropping the pitch by an octave while doubling the sustain time: the resulting "half speed" tone, dark and lo-fi, would be used extensively by Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues (e.g. "My Song") and often imitated, sometimes even with dedicated custom tapes.

Some went in for wilder modding still: Robert Webb of prog outfit England sawed a Mark II in half to keep just one of its keyboards, and adapted M400 tapes to his curious "Halftron" by hand-splicing the "timpani", "8 pc. choir" and "3 strings" sounds.

Decline and rebirth

The Mellotron's golden age was already fading by the mid-1970s. Despite technical improvements over the earliest models, the M400 and Mark V remained finicky instruments: beyond the inefficiencies and limitations already discussed, a simple voltage drop - caused, say, by a neighbour switching on an appliance - could throw the tuning into complete disarray. Pop musicians had never really taken the instrument's original mission as an orchestra substitute all that seriously, being far more drawn to its distinctive timbres and its potential as a proto-pad; but the Mellotron's near-monopoly in this niche gradually eroded over the course of the Seventies, first with the arrival of string synthesizers, then true polyphonic synthesizers, and finally digital samplers, initially very expensive but increasingly affordable. Having survived the rearguard battles of musicians' unions, hostile to tape keyboards as a potential threat to session players' livelihoods, the Mellotron headed toward commercial decline in the very years when the British music press was busy championing punk's raw energy: the movement's role in sweeping away pseudo-symphonic sounds has been greatly overstated by the music media, and, at least in the Mellotron's case, that narrative has ended up obscuring the essentially technological reasons behind the market's contraction.

Alongside the shrinking customer base came financial troubles: in 1977, the bankruptcy of major debtor Dallas Arbiter (the Mellotron's US distributor after the deal with Chamberlin fell through) also knocked out Streetly Electronics, which was forced to hand over its stock and rights to the "Mellotron" name to a Connecticut company, Sound Sales, founded by none other than a former Dallas Arbiter employee. The Bradleys set up a new company, Novatron, and carried on producing the M400 and Mark V, also introducing the T550 in 1981 (identical to the M400 but able to convert into its own travel case). Sales, however, were unimpressive, with perhaps a few hundred M400s made, and only a handful of Mark Vs and T550s (four and three, respectively).

In 1986, Novatron closed down; Sound Sales, meanwhile, had already abandoned production of its poorly received Mellotron 4 Track, made from 1981 in just five units. The Mellotron era had, it seemed, come to an end.

But is that really the case? The Mellotron never vanished from the secondhand market, and in the following decades its prices never crashed the way other musical relics' did. From the mid-Nineties on, thanks in part to alternative rock, britpop and the new prog revival, admirers of the Mello-sound began growing in number again. Digital samples of Mellotron tapes started appearing in keyboardists' sound libraries, and demand for the reservicing of vintage units grew strong enough to sustain small but significant businesses on both sides of the Atlantic. David Kean and Markus Resch, in the United States, bought the rights to the Mellotron name and began offering maintenance services and new tapes; meanwhile in Britain, Martin Smith and John Bradley (Les's son) revived Streetly Electronics, supplying spare parts and full restorations of the glorious old instruments, and, en passant, produced in 1993 the compilation "Rime Of The Ancient Sampler", a celebration of the Mellotron featuring some twenty die-hard Mellotron devotees, both Seventies veterans and newer enthusiasts.

By the late Nineties, a battered Mellotron could be bought for a few thousand pounds and resold, properly restored, for eight thousand: the time was ripe for the instrument's return to production.

In 1999, Kean and Resch announced the launch of the Mellotron Mark VI at $5,200, followed by the Mellotron Mark VII: built in Sweden, these were essentially redesigns of the M400 and Mark V, packing numerous technical improvements in service of that good old analogue sound. 2007, meanwhile, saw Streetly Electronics release the M4000, which, in a case very similar to the M400's, incorporated technology closer to that of the Mark I/II and M300, offering enthusiasts frames of 3×8=24 different sounds. Yours for £4,500. Unless, that is, you'd rather turn to digital emulations, such as the Memotron, made by German company Manikin Electronic since 2009, or the new models introduced by Kean and Resch from 2010 onward: the Mellotron M4000D, M4000D Mini, Micro and Rack offer, at more accessible prices, a digital replica of Mellotron and Chamberlin sounds that, according to both makers and fans, has no equal on the market. Of course, these remain instruments costing thousands of euros: it's no surprise, then, that many, even professionals, still rely on sample libraries (Nord keyboards offer a vast catalogue of free, lossless sounds, officially licensed by Mellotron) and VST (Virtual Studio Technology) emulators.

Whatever the source - vintage instruments or modern analogue replicas, sample-based keyboards or plugins for a digital audio workstation - the Mellotron's warm sound has firmly returned as a leading player on the musical landscape. Not bad, for an instrument that forty years ago seemed to have had its day for good!

Emulators and rivals

And what about the Chamberlin? Although it never came close to matching its descendant's sales, it remained in production until 1981. Its tonal palette is generally considered more faithful to the instruments it set out to replicate: on paper, that's a virtue, but compared to the Mellotron's enveloping, ethereal sound, the Chamberlin's is perceived as somewhat lacking in punch. Although at most a thousand units were ever made, the instrument was bought by several American recording studios, and appears on numerous pop records (often uncredited, given the unions' ongoing battle against pre-recorded sounds). The most widespread model is the Chamberlin M1, released around 1970, roughly at the same time as the Mellotron M300: like its transatlantic rival, it's a relatively compact, portable device, fitted with a single keyboard and eight sounds per tape bank, which could be combined in stereo to generate six different stereo mixes.

Following in the footsteps of the Mellotron and Chamberlin, other manufacturers built keyboards in the Seventies based on the playback of pre-recorded sounds. Some of these, like Mattel's Optigan (1971-1973) and the Chilton Talentmaker (1973-1975), were low-cost devices aimed at the toy instrument market; others, like the Vako Orchestron (1974-1975) and the legendary - though never truly commercialised - Birotron, had professional ambitions instead, aiming to surpass the Mellotron and Chamberlin in versatility and sound quality.

The first three of these didn't use magnetic tape but optically read discs. In designing its instrument, Mattel was after a technology that would keep production costs to an absolute minimum, and found it in grooves printed on cellulose, translated into an electrical signal by the combination of a light beam and a photocell. Being circular, the tracks' sustain had no time limit like the eight seconds of the Mellotron and Chamberlin; for the same reason, however, the sounds lacked any attack, making them rather unexpressive.

Sales are poor, and every instrument produced costs Mattel royalties for the use of patents filed by Chamberlin: by the time production is halted, the losses associated with the project amount to $13 million. In the few years the Optigan (a portmanteau of OPTIcal and orGAN) remains on the market, dozens of records are nonetheless released featuring solo vocals paired with a variety of accompaniments: these are low-fidelity recordings, generally themed ("Latin Fever", "Guitar In 3/4 Time", "Champagne Music", …), now collector's items among enthusiasts. The charming site Optigan.com has compiled a list of them.

While the Chilton Talentmaker is essentially an unauthorized clone of the Optigan (built by the Italian company GEM for a Californian firm, and soon pulled from the market under threat of legal action from Mattel), the Orchestron is a deluxe version of it: a wooden rather than plastic housing, high-fidelity sounds, and in some models even a built-in sequencer and synthesizer. The price, too, is markedly different: $2,000 versus the Optigan's $300. It never catches on commercially, and production halts short of a hundred units; even so, it's used by Yes on their 1976 tour and plays a prominent role on the albums "Radio-Activity" (1975), "Trans Europe Express" (1977) and "The Man-Machine" (1978) by Kraftwerk.

Even more curious is the story of the Birotron, dubbed by some "the rarest instrument in rock". It's October 1974 when a young man from Connecticut, David Biro, approaches Rick Wakeman after a concert with a strange instrument: a prototype of a new keyboard using pre-recorded tape loops, which he claims overcomes many of the limitations of the Mellotron and its rivals. Instead of tape frames or optical discs, the "Birotron" holds Stereo8 magnetic cartridges, nineteen in all, one for each pair of its 37 keys. The cartridges, each carrying eight instrumental voices, play a continuous loop with no rewind time required; swapping them out, moreover, is extremely quick and simple. Wakeman is thrilled. Not that it took much convincing: by the mid-1970s his frustration with the Mellotron's quirks has reached breaking point, fueling years of legend about a supposed bonfire of M300s staged out in the countryside. The two found a company, Birotronics, based in England, and produce high-quality recordings involving the London Symphony Orchestra. They hire capable engineers and promote the forthcoming instrument to musicians, gathering (so it's said) a thousand advance orders: interest in the project, touted as "the keyboard of the future", is, around 1975, running wild.

To harness the potential of the infinite loop without sacrificing the recognizable attack of each sound, the technicians equip every note with an envelope generator similar to those used in synthesizers: when a key is pressed, the sound's intensity varies so as to replicate the dynamics typical of each instrument (a quick, percussive onset for piano, a gradual one for strings, and so on). Driven also by the promoters' perfectionism, production costs balloon and timelines stretch. By 1977, the project is still deep in development hell; meanwhile, the digital revolution has also swept through the music world with the arrival of the first digital sampler (the Computer Music Melodian, in 1976) and the imminent release of the Prophet-5, the first polyphonic synthesizer with programmable memory. "By the time we were finally ready to start production, some bastard invented the chip and we were done for", is how Wakeman colorfully describes it decades later in an interview.

In 1979 the project is abandoned: Wakeman loses £50,000 (more than €250,000 today), Biro loses his house. Between prototypes, units never assembled and failed trials, at most thirty-five Birotrons ever existed. Complete units were probably never more than thirteen; five are known to still exist today, and only two are certainly in working order. Dave Kean, owner of the Mellotron brand, used one on the compilation "The Rime Of The Ancient Sampler", though the instrument is likely no longer functional today; another unit, which had been sitting in the Streetly Electronics warehouse, was given by Kean and Les Bradley to Dave Biro in the 1990s. All the original tapes are irreparably damaged, but for years the Canadian Chris Dale has been carrying out an elaborate restoration and digitization of the mastertapes, hoping to finally bring back a sound lost for more than forty years. Progress on the endeavor can be followed on the project's Facebook page.

Documented uses of the Birotron can be counted on the fingers of a couple of hands: Yes ("Tormato" and "Yesshows"), Rick Wakeman solo ("Criminal Record"), Tangerine Dream ("Force Majeure" and "Hyperboarea"), the American cosmic outfit Earthstar ("French Skyline", "Atomkraft? Nein, Danke!", "Humans Only") and perhaps, though uncredited, their producer Klaus Schulze ("Mirage"). Besides appearing on the Mellotron-themed compilation, Dave Kean's Birotron also turns up on "Wishbone", the album by songwriter Eleni Mandell, produced in 1999 by two dedicated vintage-keyboard obsessives, Brian Kehew and Jon Brion (The Moog Cookbook, Air, Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann).

Where to hear these instruments? First and foremost, in the many tracks listed in the OndaRock article that gives an overview of the artistic uses of the Mellotron and Chamberlin. For anyone wanting to practice picking out one sound or another, the side column lists a few tracks where a particular voice is especially prominent, plus a short selection of recent albums that are particularly rich in mellotron-isms and mellotron-like textures. These are mostly novelty records, built around the sound of their respective star instruments, or post-revival albums that the invaluable site Planet Mellotron describes as "practically a demo record" for the keyboards in question.

An in-depth look at the history of the Birotron can be found in an episode devoted to the instrument on the "Yes Music Podcast", while an entertaining episode of "In Loving Recollection" interviews the duo Optiganally Yours, a Californian combo who have made rediscovering optical organs their raison d'être (one of the two musicians is the creator of the site Optigan.com). Happy listening!

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