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The Trautonium

Posted: Thu May 30, 2013 3:05 pm
by tektoog

Re: The Trautonium

Posted: Thu May 30, 2013 10:25 pm
by 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

Re: The Trautonium

Posted: Fri May 31, 2013 8:25 am
by 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.

Jay wrote: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...

Re: The Trautonium

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2020 5:08 pm
by 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 1137 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.

Re: The Trautonium

Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2020 8:54 am
by 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!! :o
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

Re: The Trautonium

Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2020 2:10 pm
by Spogg
Moved to General so I don't accidentally delete it :lol:

Re: The Trautonium

Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2020 4:04 pm
by tulamide
The Mixture-Trautonium is also known as the first synthesizer, but Sala always hated synths :D

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.

Re: The Trautonium

Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2020 7:34 pm
by k brown
This is a good read.

Hearing the birds cry.pdf.zip
(216.69 KiB) Downloaded 1097 times