Tape Mayhem Appendix:

I've always been attracted to tape manipulation, at least as long as I've been into electronic music. One of my very first positive introductions to experimental music was the pieces made by Hugh LeCaine, the Canadian physicist and Music Concrete artist. A friend and I were doing this project called The Empire of Crime which was an outlet for my craving to make experimental tape noise. I played one of our sessions to a friend who told me a bit about LeCaine and sent me an MP3 of Dripsody and another longer piece of his called The Burning Desk. LeCaine was really into additive synthesis; creating varied sounds by introducing new sound waves as opposed to subtractive synthesis which alters the quality of sound by stripping off different harmonic and tonal layers (what most analogue gear functions on).

Hugh LeCaine designed a massive synthesizer called the Sonde which he used to create very complex sounds by adding hundreds of different sine waves together. But much earlier than that he was one of the pioneers of synthesizer technology, before Moog and Buchla but not by much, he invented things like the Electronic Sackbut Organ and something called The Special Purpose Tape Recorder which was an instrument designed to play a variety of tape loops and was triggered by a piano style keyboard.

I fell in love with the special purpose tape recorder.

I was watching old Analogue Suicide videos and there's this one featuring the newly re-released Mellotron. The Mellotron is sort of like a special purpose tape recorder in that they both work on the same principle: a mellotron plays strings and flute sounds which are recorded on different loops of tape and played back at varying speeds.

If a person were to get their hands on an old (but working) mellotron and decided to replace the tape loops underneath the keyboard you could have it play whatever sound you liked. I was thinking about this on my way home today. It would be almost like blasphemy to take apart an instrument like that and change it's innards, on the one hand a working mellotron would play all of those beautiful sounds you hear on the later Beatles records like Abby Road but if you were really methodical about it you could customize it to play anything you liked, car horns, ocean noise, screams, guitar or samples you recorded off of a modular rig. Of course to make a really functional and customized mellotron using new tape loops scaled for pitch and tracking properly on the keyboard would be a real undertaking and would involve more knowlege resources and time than most people have.

still it's a nice idea

here's a link to the Analogue Suicide post abut mellotrons