Week of 10.11.10:

The Mellotron and the Chamberlin are very sophisticated and mechanical electronic instruments with a complicated history. Harry Chamberlin and David Nixon developed the Chamberlin as a parlor instrument that was intended to be able to reduplicated the sounds of a full orchestra in one’s living room. Chamberlin devised a way to achieve this using magnetic tape recordings of sounds. The idea was that when a key is played it triggers a tape to start playing, giving the user eight seconds of sound. Each key’s tape had eight tracks, so any of eight sounds could be triggered by the keys depending on what the user wanted. In order for these tapes to work, Chamberlin had to track master versions of these tapes so we hired the Lawrence Welk Orchestra to come in and sustain perfectly tuned notes for night seconds. At this point Chamberlin is effectively making samples of each note of every instrument he wants available so that he can have recordings of different pitches for the different keys. The Chamberlin master tapes were very high quality, recorded with a Neumann U47 into an Ampex valve tape deck. Some keys would not trigger sustained notes but percussion and drum loops. These tapes could loop once placed but would snap back to their starting point when the key was no longer depressed. This made it possible to have rhythm loops in addition to sustained notes.
The first Chamberlin came out in 1948, and the Chamberlin Company was founded in 1956. Chamberlin’s main intention and therefore selling point for the instrument was that it would be a “rich man’s toy” or parlor instrument used for the entertainment of the wealthy in their homes. The Chamberlin was marketed for upper end novelty stores, piano dealers, and in magazines for the wealthy all across America in the 1950s.
Bill Franson was one of the Chamberlin Company’s best sales men when one day he disappeared. Franson stole two Chamberlin 600s and went over to Europe thinking he could make improvements on the design and market a better product. He went to England were he put an ad in the paper that connected him with three engineering brother named Bradley who owned Bradmatic. While the initial design of the Mellotron MKII, which was the first production version and was compared to the Chamberlin 600, was very similar, the Chamberlin was using a third party home stereo amplifier and had lever controls, the MK II had a proprietary amplifier designed by Bradmatic and was operated with buttons. This was the beginning of the Mellotron Company. While Chamberlin was still working out of garages and small workplaces like a “mom and pop” business, the Mellotron Company employed a large group of workers from the post World War Two generation who had all received military training in the fabrication and assembly of electronics. Melletron also had to record their own Master tapes and did so at IBC Studios in London. The general consensus is that the Chamberlin tapes were much higher quality tapes and sounded much more realistic than the Mellotron tapes, most likely due to the gear used to track and the quality of the musicians used. By the 1970 models the Chamberlin M1 and the Mellotron M400, unique aspects of the different designs became more apparent. The Chamberlin had a fixed cartridge of tapes that could not be changed out by the user but had 120 different high quality sounds. The M600 had less sounds at any given point, but the tapes could be changed out for other tapes with different sounds, and sets of tapes were sold by instrument or by theme. Changing out the tapes can be exploited as well, one artist used it by having each key trigger four measures of a piece at a time so that if a chromatic scale were played with a note every four bars an entire piece could be heard.
Shorty after the Mellotron Company was off the ground they went to the NAMM show in American and ran into the Chamberlin Company. Ultimately the Mellotron Company ended up having to pay royalties to the Chamberlin Company as well as stay in the U.K. while Chamberlin would stay in the United States. As music progressed through the sixties and early seventies the Mellotron Company had more success. Chamberlin stuck to the business model of the parlor instrument, as did Mellotron but the Mellotron was gaining more notoriety as a rock instrument and was being sought after by a different crowd. While the intentions of these instruments were to emulate the sounds of a real orchestra, they reality was that they did not sound nearly as good as the real thing, but rather had unique and intriguing qualities of its own that made it attractive. Unfortunately, these instruments were very temperamental and fragile. They were extremely sensitive to temperature and environment, so touring with them was highly impractical and difficult. It was not long before the advancements in synth and other keyboard technology made the unique necessity of the Mellotron less critical since the same sounds could be achieved through different and easier means. The companies were not making a profit and ended up in debt to their electrical component suppliers and had to fold. Other instruments were developed to try to improve upon the designs of the Chamberlin and Mellotron but none met great success. The Opticon was a tape based drum machine that could loop drum samples, and the Birotron was an adaptation of the Mellotron that was supposed to be lighter and better fit for travel as well as cheaper.
These instruments fell out of style until the late 80s when certain vintage sounds began to be sought after again. Since then the Mellotron has come back into the world of relevant rock instruments, being heard on recording by popular bands like Radiohead, Opeth, Porcupine Tree, Bigelf, Kanye West, and other progressive and texturally experimental rock and pop groups. In 1993 Mellotron Archives was founded and now the Mk VI is available for purchase and is much more usable than the older models but maintains the authenticity of the sound and operation. Developments in softsynths and samplers have made it such that Mellotron sounds are available as plug ins for DAWs and as sounds on professional grade keyboards like Nords. While the instrument might not be around forever, at least its unique sounds and tones will always be available.