An electromechanical keyboard instrument developed by Leslie, Norman and Frank Bradley in Streetly, Birmingham, during 1962–3 and manufactured by Mellotron Manufacturing (later Streetly Electronics) from 1964 to 1986. After its worldwide distributor went bankrupt in 1977 the manufacturer was obliged to rename it the ‘Novatron’, though the original name continues to be used widely. Mellotron USA only marketed a handful of unrelated digital instruments before going out of business in the early 1990s. The Mellotron has been employed chiefly in pop and rock music, including the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever (1967) and Days of Future Passed (1967) by the Moody Blues, one of whose members originally worked for the company.
The Mellotron was the first successful instrument based on pre-recorded sounds, and may be described as an analogue sampler. Several models were produced, the earlier versions having two 35-note manuals placed side by side, in which the right-hand one was used conventionally, with the left-hand one activating rhythms and chords. The Mellotron’s sounds are produced from a series of parallel lengths of pre-recorded magnetic tape that are individually controlled by keys on the keyboard. When a key is depressed the associated tape is drawn past a replay head; when it is released a spring returns the tape to its starting point. The maximum duration is between seven and ten seconds (for different models). The tape is divided into three tracks; in the two earliest models each track was subdivided into six sections, individually accessible by means of a forward and rewind control. The most popular version of the Mellotron/Novatron, the single-manual Model 400, has a smaller selection of recordings in a single section; a pitch control can vary the tape speed. A large library of pre-recorded sounds was available on replaceable tape frames; blank frames could also be obtained for the user’s own recordings. Many film and broadcasting companies used the Mellotron for sound effects.
D. Crombie: ‘The Mellotron/Novatron Story’, Sound International, no.19 (1979); rev. in Rock Hardware: the Instruments, Equipment and Technology of Rock, ed. T. Bacon (Poole, 1981), 91–5
M. Vail: ‘The Mellotron: Pillar of a Musical Genre’, Keyboard, xvii/5 (1991), 108–9, 117 only; rev. in Keyboard Presents Vintage Synthesizers: Groundbreaking Instruments and Pioneering Designers of Electronic Music Synthesizers (San Francisco, 1993), 205–12
D. Etheridge: ‘The Mellotron: the Rime of the Ancient Sampler’, Sound on Sound, viii/8 (1993), 120–30
Michael Pinder Presents Mellotron: the Mellotron Archives CD-ROM Collection of Mellotron and Chamberlin Sounds (Palo Alto, CA, 1994) [CD-ROM with text by D. Kean on the history of the Chamberlin and Mellotron]
HUGH DAVIES