It just ain’t rock!
Nonsense, philistine! Keyboards are great in rock, esp, Hammond organ and Mellotron. Mellotrons are mental machines.
The heart of the instrument is a bank of parallel linear magnetic audio tape strips. Playback heads underneath each key enable the playing of pre-recorded sounds. Each of the tape strips has a playing time of approximately eight seconds, after which the tape comes to a dead stop and rewinds to the start position.
A major advantage of using tape strips, as opposed to tape loops or cassettes (cf. the Birotron) is that the Mellotron can reproduce the “attack” transient of the instruments recorded on the tape.
A consequence of the eight second limit on the duration of each note is that if one wants to play chords that last longer than eight seconds, one must release different notes in sequence in a process that has been compared to a spider crawling across the keyboard.
