Tape replay keyboard

A tape replay keyboard is a musical instrument that uses pre-recorded analog tapes to produce sound when a key is pressed. Examples of tape replay keyboards include the Chamberlin, the Mellotron, and the Birotron.

Today samplers are used to play back musical sounds from computer memory instead of analog tape.

Tape replay keyboards were invented in the late 1940s and were in use in the music world from the 1950's through the late 1970s, the most popular being the Mellotron. With the creation of cheaper music synthesizers and samplers through digital storage, tape replay keyboards became largely obsolete, although some are still in use today and are even being produced new.

The reasons for this are:

1) Tape replay keyboards have been used on and even responsible for creating iconic recordings (for example the Mellotron on the Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever")

2) Tape replay keyboards use pre-recorded tapes where not only the musical notes are recorded, but also, for example the pick of a guitar, air in the flute (Chamberlin), scratch of the violin or cello bow (Mellotron), the breath of a choir or ambience of a real church organ (Birotron), as well as the ambient acoustics of the room the instruments were recorded in. Many musicians feel this adds an extra quality of realism and 'time capture' which is ignored or compressed out and missing from digital sources.

3) The sound of tape replay keyboards is generally of lower fidelity and as such is very smooth, shimmering, haunting and distinctive in recordings that feature them. Tape replay keyboards add an elusive colour to music that cannot be created or replicated easily by other means. This is due to tapes riding slightly uneven over tape heads with changing fidelity. The sound is also slightly different each time the key is played because the tape has moved and the start point is at a different position.

Other related keyboards that retain similar qualities are the Optigan, Talentmaker, and the Orchestron which have even lower fidelity as the sounds are played back from pre-recorded waveforms on optical discs.

All tape and disc replay keyboards are rare, not having been made in comparably large quantities. Occasional mechanical unreliability and lack of proper maintenance quickly led to mechanical breakdowns and their falling out of fashion at the end of the 1970's.

The Optigan is the most common of these and easiest to find, being mass manufactured by toy company Mattel. The Mellotron comes second with production of 1850 machines.

The Chamberlin follows with production of around 500-700 machines. The Orchestron follows next with around 70-100 machines produced.

The Talentmaker had around 50 machines produced, and the rarest and hardest to find is the Birotron which was never released commercially with only 8-12 pre-production prototypes ever assembled.