This has been something I have been planning since I first got my hands on a Mellotron in 1998, via a chance meeting with Martin Smith and John Bradley at the playback for King Crimsons's The Night Watch in a hotel near Hyde Park. It has been a long time coming, between acquiring tape sets, getting the mechanical process of being able to play the (occasionally) stubborn brute, knowing how and when to pedal on and off, knowing what notes to avoid at all costs, knowing what chords sound the sweetest, knowing what inversions work better than others, knowing what voices can be used together...
Those not in the know may scoff at such fanciful notions, but a Mellotron is more than just a dead box of thirty five little tape players linked up to an amp. Woooaaah no. If it were as easy as that then there wouldn't be a breed of roadie out there who recoils in horror when you tell them you used to take these creatures out on gigs with you. What they are not is predictable. Maybe more predictable than their somewhat unfairly tarnished tatter of a reputation allows at times, but nevertheless there is always an element of 'what will it do this time?' when you twist on the little red switch. Sometimes it plays like a charm. Other times it seems to forget that the tuning it liked last time isn't the one it's happiest with this time. Sometimes there are notes sound which right together one minute, but when played later sound utterly wrong. The attack and sustain on a note on one playing will sound great and on the next will sound a little different. The stories are legion; the best advice is to disbelieve the worst stories and treat the very best with an equal amount of suspicion. As with everything in this world the answer rather uninterestingly lies someplace in the middle. It's finding just where in the middle that is the engaging experience.
One great Mellotron lover named Julian Cope (a man who I am led to believe Googles himself regularly, so let's all wave at him now) once described himself as a 'righteous Mellotron user' but conceded anyway that they were 'breathing instruments'. Julian has the benefit of being more experienced than some and weirder than most so he probably knows what he is talking about. All I can say is that his assessment is almost completely accurate and that learning to play a Mellotron isn't a matter of anything as pedestrian as a mere musical tuition. It's learning to live with a mechanical personality capable of great power and great beauty, but which is also capable of incredible tetchiness, huge irritation and which can generally take the huff with you over slights you never knew existed. But you persist, because the moments of beauty get better and better the more you can learn to avoid the latter. (Actually this sounds similar to a description given of the last composer named on this web page. We'll get to him in time)
So anyway...to my dream. Robert Fripp once famously wondered what Jimi Hendrix would sound like if he were to play the canon of Béla Bartók on his electric guitar. I have wondered also what the music of Gustav Holst would sound like played on a Mellotron. Not just led on a Mellotron, or phrased on one, but played in its entirety on one. Fripp's unit tried this in 1969, fell foul of Gustav's estate and had to make do with a slightly watered down version that they had to rename. I'm not sure I'm going to be bound by these dull kinds of law so I'm steaming ahead. I wanted to make an album of classics and play it only on the Mellotron. No half measures. Let's just see if it can actually carry the music we all love and which may have indeed inspired us to add the sounds of the Mighty Tron to our musical arsenal in the first place.
I had to decide on the music to play. Some were obvious. Mars was an clear place to start thanks to the aforementioned guitarist's Hot Beat Combo, and Pachelbel ran in at a close second. Barber was suggested to me at an early stage in development and Bach was an inclusion that could not be overlooked, despite nearly being chucked out because I simply couldn't do the job. (Trick: Less is more -- Ignore the score.) Some didn't make it. Vivaldi and Charles Ives sounded great on one level and yet simply didn't work when listened to dispassionately. Aaron Copland actually made me laugh when I tried it (although it may have a lot to do with it sounding like me pricking the bubble of ELP) and Stravinsky started off very well but lost it due to the lack of any usable percussion at my disposal. Bach's Mass in B minor will have to wait and the rest of The Planets likewise.
Back to that lack of percussion. I have cheated only once and sampled snare and kettle drums to use in the first track. These apart, everything else you hear is the voice of a Mellotron in some way or another. I fully confess to playing fast and loose with some things, such as recording at a lower tempo to play particularly rapid sections which the dear old brute could never handle, and I'm happy to say that I have radically messed with tunings to get far lower and higher sounds than the Bradleys and Chamberlins ever saw coming out of their greatest invention. A palette of thirty five notes is a restriction when faced with some very wide ranging string music and the upper reaches of the violin are well in excess of this, so some retuning here and there was needed.
I don't read music at all. At one time I never saw the need, as I saw no purpose in playing music that someone else had played before. I still harbour that feeling to some extent, but where there is beautiful music to be played, why not play it? Faced with the scores for these pieces I had to translate them into a series of letters and shapes and (in one case) colour charts to have it make even the least sense to me. After playing the parts and putting them together I had to mix it all down properly - it's incredible just how wild twenty eight Mellotrons playing together at the same time can sound - and get it all limited and capped off without losing dynamics or having to resort to compression. Having the music resemble the composer's intent was another hurdle to overcome, and though I made some brave attempts I must thank Martin Smith and Rick Blechta for their experience and suggestions in making this all sound acceptable. I also used the ears of many colleagues and friends for some of these tracks and even enlisted the help of Cyndee Lee Rule in making up an entirely new recording of the viola to avoid me having to use the old one which was a little substandard.
Finally, a little about the kit used to record this music. I've been asked this question about a dozen times already (and at the time of writing it has only been released for three days) so I may as well add it now. The Mellotron M400 (manufactured in 1973) is played into a Mackie 1202 mixer, which I use because it is very quiet and has a delicate EQ control that can take the edge off some of the white noise coming from the Mellotron without damping out the sound. This leads in and out of an Alesis MidiVerb II effects unit which is used for the reverb and and blooms you hear, and then runs straight into the back of a computer where everything was digitally recorded in Sony ACID Pro, with digital effects coming from the Waves and Timeworks libraries. Once mixed down to my satisfaction the output was written to an uncompressed WAV file which was then bounced off an Akai 4000DS reel to reel for that pleasing thing we call tape compression. I am happy to say that this is the only compression you'll hear anywhere in the music. Likewise you will not hear any digital editng anywhere other than in places where one take was adjoined to another. Some of the very low notes you hear are being played way off the bottom end of the Mellotron by turning the motor speed down by an octave and upping the lower and top ends of the EQ to compensate for the lack of fidelity. Sometimes I simply doubled the line with the bottom end of the St Johns Wood Church Organ which has bass pedals in the recording. There was very little post-production carried out.
As a listener, my only request to you is to give this music a chance. Listen to it properly. Give it some. Play it loud. Turn up the bass. Try and absorb what it has to offer. I may be playing it but that only makes me the conduit for the genius that lay in the minds of Gustav, Tomaso, Samuel, both Johanns and Ralph. Their combined thoughts from over the last three centuries persist long after their bodies have become dust.
A Microsoft Word version of the artwork is available here and a CD label is available here. A full ISO file for the CD is available here as well as the CDT and CUE files required to burn the disc. Download all files to the same folder and then burn the CD. (I recommend IMGBURN but you may have your own personal favourite program for the job, such as NERO.) If you are using an Apple Mac then I suggest you use Firestarter FX which seems to do the trick. Note that burning the file straight in OSX will not work due to bugs with OSX and the use of CUE Sheets. Listeners who only want to stream the tracks live into Winamp (etc) may like to use the playlist available here.
As ever, the music is free for all to hear and enjoy and share. Comments are highly welcome.
Mike Dickson, Edinburgh, September 2008
This has always been a favourite of mine. As a child it's hard not to get swept away with the pictures it puts into your mind. Even without knowing about tritones there is something in this piece of music that simply reeks of evil intent. It's in the slow build up, in that great view from the distance where you can see something inevitable and overwhelming coming for you and you cannot get out of the way. It hits. It obliterates. It destroys and then it passes straight over what once was you in a rumble of timpani and brass.
The rasping howl of the Mellotron brass suits this 5/4 metred piece perfectly. A common criticism of the Mk II brass section is the combination of sounds it uses. It has a trombone and a trumpet in it, after which the natural addition would be a French horn. Unfortunately the decision was taken to make that third instrument a saxophone, which has a low end reedy buzz that makes it impossible to play anything sweetly on it at all. It's always going to be an overwhelmingly discordant sound and finds a home par excellence in this piece. The fast viola runs were all played at half speed and wound up to full speed afterwards. The gongs at the start of the piece (I think of it as the point of invasion) also come from a Mellotron, and from one of the weirdest standard sound combinations around - a tape set of marimbas is finished off at the bottom end by a series of half a dozen gongs sounds ranging from the small and tinny up to the full J Arthur Rank.
I have half a mind to (some day) record the whole of the Planets in this way, but I am aware that rather a lot of other people have done the same and am not entirely sure that it's going to be a game that is worth the candle. We'll see.
Instrumentation: Mellotron M400 Playing
Unknown to many, this is not an original by Albinoni at all (he lived between 1671 and 1751) but was in fact reconstructed from a scrap of original music discovered in what remained of a bombed-out library in Dresden. Eventually, after the discoverer Remo Giazotto had done with the piece, it had no Albinoni left in it at all, so why it is still referred to in his name is anyone's guess. Maybe it was an attempt to carry a piece on Albinoni's name. Maybe not. Maybe it was a way of demonstrating the loss of beauty in destruction. Maybe not. Maybe it was a marketing decision. The truth to me is that I don't care. With or without Albinoni's name, this music is a shattering achievement. It moves at a stately pace exchanging its voice between strings and organ and then stops quite still to pronounce one of the most emotionally wrenching codas you can imagine.
Some people hear this piece and in the context of its creation hear a mournful elegy to war and loss. That is perfectly possible. Some people hear it and cannot help having a vision of people being gunned down in Italian areas of major American cities in the 1930s, usually somewhere near to a fruit stall selling oranges, occasionally in slow motion. It's certain that the climax to this piece may be one of the most often and recognisably expressed moments of grief known in the musical canon. It also contains some of the best tone clusters you will hear anywhere. Sure, it has been overused and in some senses has become a cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason.
Although originally written for strings and organ, I found the latter impossible to pull together on the Mellotron. The only organs recorded for the instrument were the Lowrey and the full-bore Church Organ from St John's Wood, neither of which would do any justice to the stopped pipes that the score requires. Instead I opted to make the Mellotron play a flute choir, with the upper melody and harmony phrased by the original solo flute and the new Ian McDonald flute, with the even newer bass flute underneath where the bass pedals live.
Instrumentation: Mellotron M400 Playing
Where does one even start with this?
Beloved of funerals the world over and much included in a million film soundtracks, this piece of music is one of the masterpieces of 20th century composition. It's not actually a piece of music in its own right - it is the second movement of Samuel Barber's String Quartet No. 1 in B minor - but it's so well-known apart from the longer composition that it may as well be considered on its own merit.
The most famous story about it is that the conductor Toscanini received the score from Barber and promptly returned it without a word, which led Barner to believe that he had been snubbed. It was only later that he found out that the conductor was so impressed with the piece that he had committed it to memory and managed to conduct it later without reference to the score again. The story may seem apocryphal, but it is apparently true and it's easy to see why. For a start it is not a very hard piece of music to play (even I managed to record this in a day) and the arc the music follows makes it sound like it is bisected where the strings reach their highest point on fortissimo-forte, which gives the impression that you need only remember the first half of it. Of course this is all nonsense as it doesn't really follow that path at all, but it gives a deeply pleasing cycle of build, tension, release and resolution that places it in a league of its own somewhere.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this music, though, is that it was written by a man in his mid-twenties. Its stark simplicity tells of a maturity in composition that a lesser talent may have covered in ornamental sop. There is very little flesh on the bones of this music, in itself a telling part of the emotional palette the composer used. Written in 1936, Barber saw the war coming in Europe. Whether or not he meant it in that context, having Toscanini - the Italian émigré who fled his native land from Mussolinni's oppression - conduct the premiere could hardly have rendered that performance more poignant if there had been a concerted effort to do so. Realising the true beauty of complete melancholy is what propels this piece of music into the realms of genius.
Although scored for a small string section, I've used a far greater range of strings here to make a slightly denser texture than usual. Some lines are doubled (or more) by playing multiple sounds on top of one another, whilst some lines are taken up by one string voice which are then led into another.
Instrumentation: Mellotron M400 Playing
Oooh...Procul Harum alert. It's like that test you hear about, where you can tell if you're middle-class if you hear The William Tell Overture and not think immediately of The Lone Ranger.
This familiar tune is not entirely Bach at all, but an adaptation of Bach's Air, part of his Orchestral Suite no 3 in D (BWV 1068) which he wrote for Prince Leopld in the early years of the eighteenth century. It was later adapted by the German violinist August Wilhelmj into the more familiar tune we all know.
This is one of those pieces of music that is evidently great but I really have no idea why. It just is. It moves along at a fairly reserved pace (my take is a little faster than some as it can sometimes seem to plod) and has a gracefulness of melody that seems to just start and move on without leaving the spot where it commenced. Once exhausted of all it can say on that fixed spot in space it just vanishes without a trace. Was it ever there in the first place? It also seems to occupy the same tonal centre throughout its duration, yet never deigns to repeat itself. At the very point where it seems that it is bound to repeat itself, the music stops.
The piece is scored for a string quartet but I found that it a little thin in places on the Mellotron, so I added much more into it and in the dubious process made it a great lumbering mass of rather mechanical sounding concrete and timber that was completely at odds with what I was trying to get across. So, I gave up on all of that and tried again, this time by revoicing it using what you see below, but playing much more subtly. Sometimes it's not transparent what the counterpoint behind the Classic Strings is doing, but the fact it is there is important.
Those of you interested in this tune may also like to hunt around for Antony Verbern's recording from the 1970s on the CRD label where it is played on a variety of different instruments including flutes, a 16th century pipe organ and a lute. Unfortunately I only have it on vinyl so I'm not able to give you links to handy Internet outlets, but it's maybe the best and most unusual version I have heard.
Instrumentation: Mellotron M400 Playing
Someone whose name I have inconveniently forgotten once said that the difference between what passes for mass culture and popular culture is that the former tends to turn out rubbish we all know is rubbish, whereas the latter tends to produce the sort of art that brings us all together in nodding approval of what we have just witnessed.
It would probably be right to have Pachelbel's Canon in D held up as a shining example of what popular culture can do for us. I'm sure that we can hardly name another composition that Johann P. ever put together, but such is the simplicity and elegance of this shimmeringly gorgeous piece that it has ensured that his name is going to be remembered for centuries. Sure, it has been featured on more TV adverts than <fill in name of de jour personality here> but that only means that some advertising executive somewhere reckons it can reach out to people easily because they recognise it and like it. And ultimately, that's what makes this music so enduring: we all like it. (Well maybe with the sole exception of Rob Paravonian but he has his reasons.)
My first attempt at this sounded great, but then the voice of trusted ears told me that it didn't sound like a Mellotron. It actually sounded like a real string section playing it. The voice was right, so it has been been rephrased in the voice of the Mellotron's 'Classic Strings' which gives it that ambiguous, disembodied edge.
Instrumentation: Mellotron M400 Playing
I never thought I would be able to do this. In fact I'm still not sure that I have actually 'done' anything with it. I hope it is enough to say that this is the piece of music - above all others on this entire web site - that I have spent the longest time recording. Four months in total. I've started and stopped it twice and scrapped it once, but I felt I just had to soldier on regardless because I was doing something. I even thought at one time I would only be recording this for myself, as I never thought I could possibly do it justice. Listening to it now I hope that I have.
Vaughan Williams wrote this masterful music specifically for Gloucester Cathedral in 1910, composing it for a double string orchestra and a string section, each of the three parts being used to mimic the swell, great and choir divisions on an organ. The theme (heard only three times in the piece's duration) is based upon Thomas Tallis' Why Fum'th In Fight, but the remainder takes its cue from the extemporisation that places this deeply within the Elizabethan Fantasy category, where (again, a recurring theme with me) one thing flows into another and then to another and so on, never coming back to where it started but always slipping you the hint that it might. Of course, this does happen in the end of the Tallis Fantasia but not until it has exhausted all other correct possibilities of exploration.
This composer is often dismissed as being a tad too romantic, too rolling English hills, too folk music, too soundtracky, too pastoral, too lightweight for many to take entirely seriously. The Tallis Fantasia is all of these things in a sense - it's not music that could possibly come from any other country than England - yet it fulfills so much more than wistful longings for the simple life that arguably never really existed anyway. And it pulls some magnificent musical tricks too. The best of the lot is the opening, with the grounded basses and cellos playing only half a dozen legato notes in harmony along with violins at the upper end of their range, slowly fading into the picture. The distance between the tones provides you with not only a foundation, but a huge vaulted ceiling above it - Vaughan Williams was building a cathedral in sound within which context the rest of the music will be heard, and it's impossible (I think) to hear the slow entrance of these notes without thinking of sunlight streamed through stained glass windows in the nave. Magnificent.
Like good English beer there is something profoundly satisfying about this composition. It may be the sonority of the strings, the delicacy of the small section juxtaposed with the enormity of a double orchestra, the winding and meandering lines of the viola towards the end, the endless rising upwards of the two orchestras playing across one another...or it might just be that it just feels completely right.
Playing it is hard work. Listening to it is a revelation. I don't believe much of what I read about him, but when I hear this I feel like I've just met the Almighty himself. Heaven knows what this must sound like to the devout.
