Making Mellotron Inspired Sounds on Cassette Portastudios
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- Опубліковано 15 жов 2022
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In this video I experiment with making Mellotron inspired sounds on two Tascam cassette portastudios (the original 424 and 488 machines). This technique is sometimes referred to as ‘The Poor Man’s Mellotron’, and Alessandro Cortini from Nine Inch Nails is probably the most famous musician to popularise the technique in recent years. 10cc also did something similar in the 70’s (although far more elaborate). Lol Creme from the group explains more about their approach below.
“I’d become obsessed with tape loops after listening to the Beatles’ Revolution 9. Our studio used to do recordings for the Mellotron, a keyboard that played prerecorded notes. Session musicians would come in and do these painstaking recordings for every instrument of an orchestra, one note at a time, so that when they were all played together on a Mellotron it sounded like an orchestra. I was fascinated by this, and wanted to try it with banks and banks of voices.
The whole process took about a week. It was incredibly tedious. Three or four of us had to sing every note about 14 times, then put echo on it, which gave it that luxurious, velvety harmonic sound. It was beautiful, but Eric’s vocal was what really made the song.”
Remixes of my bands songs ‘Bad News Rising’ and ‘City Blues’ feature in this video - I essentially play along to them with my homemade Mellotron tapes. The original versions are available on Spotify and all the other usual places.
open.spotify.com/track/5h2BLK...
open.spotify.com/track/5U0ONr...
#Tascam488
#Tascam424
#TapeRecording
#Retrorecordingtechniques
#cassettes
#tapeinstrument
#hainbach
#AlessandroCortini
#mellotron
#Analog
#I’mnotinlove10cc
Maybe with the resurgence in hardware synths, somebody can make one that uses a tape as the oscillators. It could be a little cassette module with the filters etc, and you can control it with a midi keyboard.
Now that would be awesome, let’s hope someone with the right skill set reads this and creates one!
Genius. Loving your creativity.
Thanks again for your positive comments, I really appreciate it and cheers for checking out some of the content on here! 🙌
That sounds pretty authentic!
Thanks, it certainly seems to get me part of the way there for not much money.
Brilliant, thank you Adrian, I was thinking of trying this using my Porta02 into 488mkII
Interestingly the erase doesnt work on one channel on the 488 meaning I can do sound-on-sound if I plan it out in advance. Thinking that could offer even more options for running a feed from the Porta02 into it with drones on...
Many thanks Robin, glad you like the video. That should be really interesting if you can do sound-on-sound recording on the faulty track on your 488mkII, would love to see how you get on! I found using the guitar drones the most fun in these experiments, as they had more random artefacts.
Interesting take on producing more unique sounds without VSTs. My MF-P01 might be able to do something rudimentary if not exactly like that, but I have no way of slowing the tape down like shown here.
Thanks, yeah you could still get the tape saturation etc with your MF- P01. If you have an octave pedal you could also try running the outs of the portastudio through that to play with the pitch?
@@wehappyfewmusic interesting idea! I will have to dig through my pedals to see if that'll work!
Very G
Many thanks 🙏
A joke for deaf ??? This isn't you'd wrote mellotron on your article that it would sound strings from a mk2 !! My 1967 one never ever sounds like this !!!
This is just inspired by mellotrons, not meant to be recreation, You’re lucky to have had a real one.
What about songs with chord changes?
It’s easier to record the main chords onto separate tracks for that scenario.