Mellotron, mellotron, mellotron… I’m obsessed with this magical machine. I was born in the 60s when this instrument was in its heyday. I’ve experienced those hauntingly beautiful sounds for as long as I can remember. And for most of my life, I had no clue what this beast was or how it produced these sounds. The answer came much later with the dawning of the internet. I discovered the power of the search engine Ask Jeeves (the Homo erectus to modern-day Google).
I became very interested in synths in the 80s. I eventually bought a Korg DW8000 from Ronnie’s guitar shop in Pearl. I had became familiar with this one because it was used in the first band I was in. At that time Ronnie had an early “sampler” keyboard that he showed me when I was looking for synth. His store was on the left end of what is now the Conoco (Old Brandon Rd near the old Fire Station). There was a dog grooming business just next door. At some point, he had recorded a dog bark into the sampler keyboard. He could play the dog bark in several different keys since it automatically transposed the bark and assigned to each key on the keyboard. While he was demonstrating the keyboard to me, he started randomly striking several keys at once and every dog in the next door business was barking… it was hilarious! At that time, I was amazed at the new technology. I thought this was the first sampler made but I would learn later that was not the case…
