[A view of the interior of the Mellotron M400. Click the image to enlarge. To learn more about how the Mellotron works, see this page (where I found this image) at the Candor Chasma “information about Mellotron, Fairlight and other vintage keyboards” site.]
A dim little back corner of the cabinet which houses musical-instrument history is occupied by an odd device called the Mellotron. It was an early “synthesizer,” sort of. But it didn’t create the sounds of other instruments artificially, by generating electronic pulses and sending them directly to amplifiers and sound boards. The Mellotron played strips of audiotape, several seconds in length, on which had been recorded a host of musical instruments: at its simplest, one note per instrument per strip of tape. Choose your instrument and press a key on the keyboard; the corresponding tape strip moves over a playback head; and out comes the sound of that instrument playing that note. When you release the key, the tape is repositioned so the playback head returns to the beginning of the strip.
(It puts one in mind of that Samuel Johnson wisecrack: “It’s like a dog dancing on its hind legs. The wonder is not that it does it well, but that it can do it at all.”)
