Electronic & Digital Pianos 2

In the late 60s/early 70s, several British bands started mixing rock-’n’-roll with classical motifs and background, forming a new genre of music called “classical rock.” One of the first bands to explore this territory was the Manchester, England band, The Moody Blues. Their second record album, “Days Of Future Passed,” was full of extended-length songs incorporating classical expositions, and actually featured the London Festival Orchestra backing the five rock musicians. For those who enjoyed this marriage of folk, rock and classical music, it was a thing of beauty.

But it posed an interesting problem for the band. How could they take this sound on the road? They could not afford to lug the whole London Festival Orchestra around with them all over England and America.

Fortunately the problem was solved before it began by the “dreaming into being” of an “electronic orchestral instrument simulator,” that someone had recently invented…the mighty Mellotron. A completely different approach to simulating orchestra instruments using a keyboard, instead of filtering and blending frequencies electronically, the Mellotron was simply a tape-playback machine. Inside every Mellotron was a bank of 8-second tape loops, one for each key on the keyboard. Each loop of tape contained a recording of a violin, or a flute, or even a choral vocalist singing “ooh” or “aah”. Press down a key, and, depending on which instrument you chose, you got a tape playback of the corresponding note being played on that instrument. Smaller versions had just three instrument choices, but larger Mellotrons had many more instruments. And the Moody Blues had one! Indeed, their keyboardist, Mike Pinder, had worked at the Mellotron factory as his day job!

The Mellotron represented one of the first real orchestra instrument simulators that actually sounded like the real thing…because it was the real thing, just on tape! That instantly identifiable run you hear on the Moodies’  “Nights In White Satin,” that lovely D-E-F#-G-F#-D-E passage in between each line sung by Justin Hayward? That’s not real violins, that’s Mike playing those notes on the keys of his Mellotron.

Of course, if you listen closely, it doesn’t quite sound like actual violins. It sounds wavy and thin, like violins being played underwater. That’s the best a box full of triggered tape loops could reproduce in the pre-digital era. Now look how far we’ve come in just a few decades!

Early electronic (non-tape) synthesizers only allowed one note at a time, no chords, and their simulations of other orchestral instruments were weird and clearly unrealistic. Then came polyphonic (multi-note) sytheseizers and somewhat better instrument imitations.

The advent of the digital age and the ability to store more and more information on smaller chips allowed for the first true rendering of the sounds we hear from the real instruments.  Even now, the discriminating listener can tell the difference. Some instruments, like a flute or trumpet, produce relatively simple and stable soundwaves, and so their imitated versions on modern keyboards can sound pretty real. Other instruments, like strings and guitars, have very complex waveforms, and are harder to reproduce realistically.

Of all the instruments in  the orchestra, the piano has the most complex waveform, so even the finest digitally-recorded imitations, multi-sampled across many octaves and striking forces, still sounds like a “recorded piano” to an ear very accustomed to hearing the real thing.  See my next post…
 

For more check out these related posts

• Electronic & Digital Pianos 4
• Electronic & Digital Pianos 1