Bobby Darrin's Custom-Made Mellotron on eBay
Robert writes:> I just came across an eBay listing for a Mellotron (actually it's the even rarer Chamberlin variant) that was allegedly built for Bobby Darrin and used on his recording of "Mack the Knife". The Mellotron used a row of tape loops with pre-recorded sounds (say, that of a violin), one for each note. It's considered to be the first sampling keyboard.The write-up on the auction is actually pretty interesting, going into the history behinds this model's creation and its subsequent states of repair.
It's currently going for just over two grand.
CHAMBERLIN M-300 VINTAGE SYNTH MELLOTRON KEYBOARD RARE! [eBay]
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No, that would require that it actually, you know, sample. These sounds were prerecorded at the factory. There are no record heads on this machine. Playback was complicated enough!
Mr. Universe:
Before I remove your comment here, I'll answer your questions, even though you know the answers already.Your comments have been unpublished because, through some unimaginable fluke that I'm sure will puzzle all who see it, they happened to come from the exact same IP address used by another commenter who was suspended for misbehavior, and by three of the sockpuppets he's used to try to evade his suspension.
One of those sockpuppets, Mr. Universe, is you. And since you had two or three letters telling you in advance that that was what would happen if you continued to use sockpuppets in this clueless fashion, I can't see why you're complaining.
Very nice.
I'm a cube monkey at a corporation that employs over 30,000 people; any of them browsing from the United States will have the same external IP address, as we go through the corporate router. A lookup of the owner of "my" IP address would verify this.
Surely you can tell from the content of my posts that I'm not a spammer or a vandal. That should have been your first clue that we might be different people.
I'm a little unseated by your "shoot first and ask questions later" policy. Don't tase me, bro.
If I were shooting, I'd be deleting comments, not unpublishing them.
There's little difference between the two unless they actually get published again, wouldn't you say?
Anyway, try this:
Replace the "x's" in this link with my IP address:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
I'm curious about what sort of vandalism you're actually seeing. I'm surprised someone would engage in a serious attack from this domain.
The Mellotron is one of the most under-appreciated musical devices of the 60s. My favorite examples are on the early King Crimson albums (the smack-you-in-the-face string parts from "The Court of the Crimson King" and "Epitaph", for example).
Unfortunately, (like a lot of gear from that era) it's a sisyphean ordeal to keep it running and in tune. When the Mellotron heats up, the tape loops start to stretch and detune. But like an original Minimoog, the idiosyncratic imperfection is what makes the sound so... "real".
Sold for just over 11K