The Trautonium

[tektoog]

Delightful...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tQQEChMq1A

[Jay]

bizzare looking and sounding instrument! looks like some mad scientist equipment hee hee I wants one!

what are the metallic strips under the keys?

Regards

[trogluddite]

Nice find, tektoog - great to see another vintage instrument that hasn't been killed off by MIDI! Love the finger vibrato 'string' sounds, beautifully played.

what are the metallic strips under the keys?

It's a 1930's vintage ribbon controller, a 'fretless' keyboard in effect - the Wikipedia page has a pretty good description...

[k brown]

Note the subtle and almost constant use of the expression pedal; something far too few synths players do anymore. A big part of Vangelis' expressive playing is his use of the CS80's polytouch control of osc volume, and to a lesser extent filter cutoff. You see the same thing with Hammond players - that exp pedal is going all the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trautonium

Anybody ever diddle with Rick Jelliffe's Newmixturetrautonium?
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/neumix ... k_jelliffe
Pretty strange beast, and hideous to look at, but quite unique. Don't know how close it can get to sounding like a real one, but interesting anyway. Apparently deadware now, but here's a copy if anyone wants to experiment with it.

Neumixturtrautonium.zip

(6.53 MiB) Downloaded 970 times

Could be an interesting project for someone (Spogg?) to recreate in FS!

http://www.doepfer.de/traut/traut_e.htm

I honestly can't fully follow Doepfer's description of what the SubHarmonic Generator does; what pitches it generates.

[Spogg]

I never heard of this before. The original post is 7 years old, so I didn’t see it.

What a truly fascinating instrument! Especially considering when it was first invented. Neon tube relaxation oscillators!!
It’s wonderful how whatever technology is available, someone will always push it to the limits to create musical instruments.

The main issue of reproducing it is the reliance on a ribbon controller to get the expressivity. I guess one could use a Seaboard RISE keyboard, but I doubt it would be the same as an analogue ribbon controller.

Cheers

Spogg

[Spogg]

Moved to General so I don't accidentally delete it

[tulamide]

The Mixture-Trautonium is also known as the first synthesizer, but Sala always hated synths

Fun fact - Hitchcock's The Birds wouldn't be half as thrilling without the Trautonium. Sala made all the bird noises throughout the movie with it.

[k brown]

This is a good read.

Hearing the birds cry.pdf.zip

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