The Committee to Keep Music Evil Forum

Anyone have a clue as to what rob is using for the organ and mellotron sounds? The organ sounds like a nord but the mellotron sounds are so real sounding. The big white organ looking thing could be a real mellotron I guess but that would be so much work to maintain and so risky to haul around. Any ideas?

Also anyone know why both of Anton's channels ( normal and vibrato) are receiving input live these days?


Lastly, Anton seems to be in some open tuning for Supersonic that he specifically gets the six string starstream in? Open A I guess?

Mostly curious bout the key setup but figured I'd make my post worth it and go all the way

don´t know anything about the organ, but i think anton normal channel, not the vibrato. the vox ultrasonic has the vibrato in it. but he didn´t use it very much at the recent tour. i always try a lot to get the sound anton has when he starts "servo" for example. i never get it.
what i know is, anton plays very gently, he turns guitar and amp very loud and touches the strings very soft with the plectrum...

To help you out a bit, he uses the vibrato channel because that channel has the reverb on it which he is never without (that I can think of). A key in getting the servo opening lead soUnd is picking far back on the strings, pretty much right over the bridge pickup or even a little further back. The ferro sonic pickups in the vox guitar make a lit of difference also, as does the fact that the guitar is hollow body. The other ingredient is of course his hands, which in the case of Anton's, really makes a huge difference. It can be emulated but he truly has a very unique way of actually playing the guitar to get that rickety, wounded but full kind of lead sound. Still interested in amps settings though.

I'm pretty sure that's a Mellotron. LIkely the same one the QA used at APF4. I think the synth on top of the Mellotron is a Korg. This has to be a lot easier rig to haul around than previous tours where he hauled a B3 all over the place along with several other keys.

I didn't notice Anton using the normal channel but he certainly could have been -- every time I saw him adjust the amp, he was adjusting the vibrato channel. He seemed to switch between the amp's tremolo and the Sonic Boom pedal's tremolo depending on the song.

Yeah it looked like he may have had the amp jumpered cause it looked like, as I said, inputs from both channels were being used. It might have ha something to do with the space echo or the send and return on the sonic boom pedal.

I think Rob's defo playing a newly purchased Mellotron. I believe he acquired it just before APF.

Yup, I'm assuming that it is the same one too. He proudly introduced it when QA were setting up at APF4.

it is one of these digital mellotrons : http://www.mellotron.com/digital-mellotron.html

Well, THAT's not authentic!
(I do remember a QA gig at Casey's, though - gmgates, I believe you were there - where there was much consternation as the mellotron refused to work properly)

Yeah, I agree, it definitely isn't vintage. But the nature of a Mellotron really does lend itself to a digital recreation that is both faithful and much more reliable.


Was that gig before or after APF4 (April 2011)? When Rob was setting up at APF4, he mentioned that they were debuting their new Mellotron and it definitely looked like a newer version. You can see it in this photo:

I think it was this gig - January 2011.

More here: http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=85503363@N00&q=Quarter%20after

The Casey's show was in January 2011.

I think the mellosonic arrived after that. I'm pretty sure the first time it was pointed out to me was in June last year - Aberdeen had borrowed it for a show. But I'm not that observant with stuff that isn't a guitar.