Instrumental - RICKENBACKER 12 STRING - MELLOTRON

RICKENBACKER 12 STRING

There is no more beautiful sound in pop than the jangling, sad sunshine of a well played 12-string. And the Rickenbacker is the undisputed queen of those guitars.

John Lennon began a love affair with Rickenbacker guitars in 1960, when he bought a six-string Model 325 Rickenbacker. He played the blonde-coloured guitar on all the Beatles recordings until early 1964 – listen for the rhythm track on ‘All My Loving’ for a definitive example of the sound. You can see it in concerts from this period; it was repainted black after a while: this is the incarnation you can see on the footage of The Ed Sullivan Show. John later owned three other Rickenbackers – these early ones were all conventional six strings – and eventually got a unique 12-string.

But it was his fellow Beatle, George, who was perhaps more associated with the Rickenbacker sound. He owned the second 360 model 12-string ever made by the company. The first one – and if this ever comes up in a pub quiz, you owe Rock Solid a pint – was sold by Rickenbacker CEO FC Hall to a Country and Western artist from Las Vegas called Suzi Arden.

These 12-strings featured the ingenious arrangement of putting the machine heads at alternate right angles, allowing the 12 tuners to fit on the headstock. They were lovely instruments, with the neck running all the way down into the body, as was the Rickenbacker way, and the finish carrying all the way up the neck and onto the headstock.

It is this instrument that you can hear on classic 12-string Beatles songs like ‘Eight Days A Week’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. The group became so closely associated with the firm that adverts for the Model 1996 in the UK offered for sale ‘The Beatlebacker’. In 1965, on tour, a Minnesota radio station presented George with another 12-string Rickenbacker; he used this for some years but it was stolen after the famous final concert in Candlestick Park.

And it was the film of A Hard Day’s Night that inspired undoubtedly the most-celebrated of all the 12-string players: Roger McGuinn. He saw the guitar in the movie and knew he had to have it, and that he would make music to utilise its lovely, unique sound to the full. As Roger himself said: 

“The Byrds’ sound would have been impossible without the invention of the Rickenbacker twelve string electric guitar.”

Those two ‘Toaster’ pick-ups and the synchronised octaves that each pair of strings produced lead to that unmistakeable jangly, bell-like sound of the Byrds. Soon, other bands were also catching on to the possibilities: Tom Petty and Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers, Pete Townshend of The Who, John Fogerty of CCR, Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane, Brian Jones of The Stones, Carl Wilson of The Beach Boys… all found a use for the 12-string Rickenbacker.

The instrument’s popularity faded somewhat in the Seventies, the Toaster pick-up not being suited for the high-gain sounds of hard rock, but they enjoyed a resurgence – especially in the UK – with jangle pop sounds more recently. Johnny Marr, a real guitarists’ guitarist, proudly displays the 12-string he used for the strange and lovely Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others on his website. Once saw an interview with Johnny where he said that he knew it was time for The Smiths to call it a day when he wrote that soaring, majestic guitar part and Morrissey came back with lyrics about “some girls’ mothers are bigger than other girls’ mothers.”

Thankfully for lovers of beautiful instruments everywhere, Marr didn’t clunk him round the head with the 12-string.

MELLOTRON

The Mellotron’s tale is a story of tapes, patience, prog, angry roadies, Birmingham and the Moody Blues. But it begins in California the year after the Second World War ended.

Over on America’s West Coast in 1946, an amateur organist called Harry Chamberlin made a tape recording of his playing to give to a friend. Then he had a brainwave:  why not create a machine that would reproduce little samples of his organ-playing at the push of a button? He designed a mechanism that would allow short sections of audio tape to be played when a key was depressed on a keyboard. The first bank of sounds he stored was drum noises, 14 in all. He refined his design, settling on a box with two keyboards: one for recorded samples and sound effects, and another 35-note keyboard that he figured would cover the range of most instruments.

He got a salesman named Bill Fransen to help him shift them, and opened up a shop. However, there were problems: Harry’s production couldn’t keep up with demand, and the tape mechanism was fiddly and unreliable, partly because the tape-heads were not of uniform precision.

Bill took matters into his own hand and travelled to England in 1962 to see about sourcing higher quality tapeheads for the playback device, and found a Birmingham engineering company run by brothers Les, Frank and Norman Bradley that fit the bill (for younger readers, Britain used to manufacture quite a lot of things in the old days, strange though it may seem now).

He showed them two of Harry’s Model 600 Music Masters and the small company realised that this was a brilliant opportunity. The only person not happy was Harry, who was understandably pretty pissed about his employee hawking his baby around on the down-low. Eventually, Harry calmed down and Bradmatic Limited, in partnership with Chamberlin, formed a company called Mellotronics, and this combination of British engineering expertise and American innovation was soon producing the machines, now called Mellotrons, in Aston, Birmingham.

The brothers, renaming their manufacturing company Streetly Electronics, set about recording tapes for the Mellotrons and building them. This was not an easy task. The rhythm keyboard needed 35 tape recordings that could play in time with each other and had to start simultaneously. And in tune. The first set of rhythms took three months. Then they recorded the lead side of the machine. Eventually, they were ready to produce.

The Mellotron Mk II enjoyed some early exposure thanks to the big bands of the day like the Stones, the Beatles and the Kinks, and also some publicity due to a number of celebrity owners. Princess Margaret, Peter Sellers, King Hussein of Jordan and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. And who wouldn’t want to make up a Mellotron quintet with that fab four?

It had a strange, almost eerie tone, because each sound was recorded in isolation; and some inevitable wow and flutter from the tape heads. It meant that pitch control was tricky, and the tuning knob was right by the keyboard for easy adjustment. They weren’t cheap, at a grand a pop.

But whatever the technical problems, the ability to recreate the sound of a string section or an orchestra on a portable (ish) keyboard was a massive boon for bands.

Graham Bond – whose jazz-driven Graham Bond Organization started the careers of future Cream stars Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce – was the first to use the Mellotron, in 1965. But it was a Brummie, Mike Pinder, who was the new instrument’s greatest champion. He had gotten a job at Streetly Electronics as a sort of test pilot, playing each of the instruments for quality control. Cool job. In 1964, Mike formed the Moody Blues and their second single, ‘Go Now’, set them on their way. Mike used the Mellotron on his own records, and also introduced it to The Beatles.

The instrument’s use on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was the early classic of its kind, recorded in December 1966, and Pinder himself then displayed the Mellotron to great effect on 1967’s Days Of Future Passed which contained Tuesday Afternoon and, of course, Nights In White Satin. Artists from Donovan on ‘Celeste’, to Pink Floyd on ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’ to the Stones on ‘2000 Light Years From Home’ and Marvin Gaye on ‘Mercy Mercy Me’ – to name just four – used it in this period from 1967 until the end of the decade.

The influence of Mike Pinder and the Mellotron on progressive rock was huge. Countless bands caught onto the possibilities it opened up, from Barclay James Harvest to King Crimson to Bowie and Rainbow and Led Zep. Yes were a band very closely associated with the Mellotron: to combat its fragility, they always toured with two, and the heavy but delicate instruments were a roadie’s worst nightmare. Tangerine Dream were the other act who really harnessed the device – have a listen to Phaedra or Rubicon for some awesome playing.

As technology advanced, and cheaper, more reliable polysynths became available, the Mellotron’s popularity waned. The advent of punk saw it regarded as totemic of the pompous noodling associated with the most overblown excesses of prog. But it was unfair, really: the Mellotron was a fantastic innovation and the inspiration for some seminal work. Score one to Birmingham!

AT

JN