It would be cool to modify one of these to record on each one of the tape strips to play custom sounds.
No. That was the Emulator. The Mellotron came with pre-recorded tapes that only ran for about ten seconds, and it couldn’t sustain notes or chords longer than that.
The Emulator was solid state, the owner/player could record any sound they wanted, load them into the machine and play them as notes; it was quite common for people to record all of the sounds from a Mellotron onto an Emulator, which was much more stable, and the notes could be sustained for as long as required.
Peter Gabriel had one of the first, IIRC.
There are bands still using Mellotrons, though - I saw Opeth not so long ago, and I was delighted to see their keyboard player had two of them on stage!
I was also lucky enough to see King Crimson last year on their 50th Anniversary tour - the first rock album I ever listened to was ‘In The Court Of The Crimson King’, one of my classmates brought it to school, and I was captivated by the sleeve design, and he let me borrow it.
That was in 1969, just after it was released, and that album changed forever how I viewed and appreciated music; before that it was just what I heard on the radio, the Stones, Beatles, some Jethro Tull and other chart stuff, but I never got to see Crimson until last year, fifty years later!
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Aaah, 70’s memories…our keyboardist played that model Mellotron and I, as Bassist/techhead for the band, found myself splicing a broken tapestrip or two “in the field” judiciously using scotch tape. Doubt that he’s using it these days as keyboard player for the Opry.
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Very little if any. The Orchestron and Optigan worked more like film soundtracks, with analog sounds on individual tracks. CDs use a laser reflecting off a metal layer with pits (or a dye layer), reading digital data from a single spiral track.
I never knew the Optigan or Orchestron existed until today, but it strikes me how much they resemble the toy Magnus organ from my childhood. I’d heard of the Mellotron before, but mistakenly thought they used tape loops instead of spring-loaded strips.
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