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Mellotron

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21 mentions in 13 episodes.

Bombay Bicycle Club

47:18 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“They have this wonderful Mellotron, which is a very early kind of sampler... found this setting called— I think it's trying to be a guitar.”
A Mellotron at the church studio, on a bad-sounding steel-string guitar setting, generated the main percussive riff of Just a Little More Time.

Bonobo

1:40:10 · Mellotron plugin · named · medium confidence
“I had this line in my head and I played it on a Mellotron plugin at the time... later replayed on the clarinet.”
A Mellotron emulation carried the Black Sands melody line in the demo before live clarinet and horns replaced/doubled it.

CMAT

16:44 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“We sort of layered up some Casios and Mellotrons, just all those fake stringy or organ-y kind of things.”
Mellotron used as one of the layered 'fake string' sources for the album's signature sustained drone.
33:44 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“We went with a Mellotron drone. There's a Mellotron drone almost all the way through.”
A Mellotron drone became the bedrock of Euro Country and arguably the anchor of the whole album.
1:18:34 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“Bunch more Mellotrons… we used the Mellotron and got whole layered horns from the Mellotron.”
Rather than hiring a horn section, Ollie layered Mellotron horn and string sounds into Take a Sexy Picture of Me.
1:18:58 · Mellotron app · named · medium confidence
“We did a quick sketch of this using the Mellotron app on the phone just to sketch it out.”
The Mellotron phone app was used to sketch the brass line before the real Mellotron horns were recorded.
1:53:57 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“Use an Omnichord, use a Mellotron, don't use anything else.”
Kira's tongue-in-cheek production advice boils the album's palette down to Omnichord and Mellotron.

Clean Bandit

1:31:08 · Mellotron flute samples · named · medium confidence
“it's a Mellotron flute. Like, you know, old Mellotron, like a Mellotron sample library, but played with loads of pitch bend and a bit of distortion”
The 'electric flute' in the I Miss You drop is a Mellotron flute sample library played from a keyboard with heavy pitch bend and distortion.

Declan Mckenna

10:50 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“I think the chords initially he just played on like a Mellotron or his Juno, something a little bit like what's actually on the track.”
Declan describes the chords of Mulholland's Dinner and Wine being written on producer Luca Buccellati's Mellotron or Juno.
25:17 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“That and the Mellotron were kind of the main keyboards in Luca's studio. So there's a lot of that all over everything.”
The Mellotron and Juno were the two main keyboards in Luca's studio and appear across the album.
43:48 · Mellotron · named · medium confidence
“And there's also these strings, Mellotron strings probably.”
Mellotron string parts added in LA give Breath of Light a more grounded, classic element.
56:30 · Mellotron M4000 · named · medium confidence
“what we used was like a pedal called, I believe it's the Electro-Harmonix Mellotron M4000, where you can plug in a guitar and it just has the Mellotron sound.”
Declan explains the guitar pedal that maps guitar notes to Mellotron sounds; he used its brass setting for the Mezzanine riff and on Sympathy.

Djo

37:27 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“Another thing on this record is the Mellotron. That thing is everywhere.”
The studio Mellotron became a recurring album-wide texture.

HAIM

1:18:26 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“Mellotron is illegal to Danielle... I snuck in a couple Mellotrons on this. It's like three different Mellotrons panned differently”
Three tucked, differently panned Mellotron parts open up the bridge of Now It's Time despite Danielle's scepticism about the instrument.

Hayley Williams

49:19 · Mellotron · named · medium confidence
“That's where we randomly ended up using this Mellotron sound to kind of give it that pop thing.”
A Mellotron sound provides the 'tiny violin', early-2000s TRL-pop flavour in the Love Me Different bridge.

Kae Tempest

58:21 · Mellotron M4000 · named · high confidence
“Some strings from the Mellotron, and some brass to sort of approximate very quickly... I was putting stuff down on that Mellotron MD 4000.”
The Mellotron M4000 provided choir, pizzicato and string sketches on 'Forever' standing in for live strings until Raven Bush replaced them.

Lizzy McAlpine

19:41 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“The sound of it is Taylor's Mellotron going into a very small little projector amplifier... we did the whole Mellotron on the record through that speaker”
Taylor Mackall's Mellotron (trombone setting) was the source of the record's signature 'foghorn' sound and was used throughout the album.

Rex

30:52 · Mellotron · named · medium confidence
“It'd be like a Mellotron from one thing and a crash from something else and an old sample I had made”
A Mellotron sound was one of dozens of layered sources stacked into a single chord that was then resampled and Melodyne'd.

Rudimental

23:55 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“I remember from the session there was like a Mellotron. Where's the Mellotron?”
A Mellotron in Fraser T. Smith's studio was layered onto 'Thank You' (through a reverb) to create its 1970s feel.

The Favours

3:54 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“If anything else happens, it'll be like a little Mellotron here, or things that really suit those instruments.”
Mellotron is cited as one of the few colours allowed outside the core band palette.
1:06:52 · Mellotron · named · high confidence
“And then the other production elements to just snap through them, some Mellotrons.”
Mellotron overdubs thicken David's Brother, with Ash recalling Finneas's enthusiasm playing it.