Old School Sounds on the Steelphon S900 And Mellotron M400
A repair shop in the Cincinnati area, Foleytronics, shared this Berlin School style synth jam, featuring the rare Steelphon S900 synthesizer and a Mellotron M400 tape playback keyboard.
What they say about the gear:
“This is a demo of Tom’s Steelphon that got whooped by UPS – broken circuit boards, broken MDF case, no output. We took the case to be reproduced by Kent Meloy of Tunguska Guitars and in the meantime went to town on the electronics. There isn’t a schematic available anywhere, but after getting the rails back and the keyboard CV working, there was still no output. I isolated it to the filter board and realized the VCF is a Moog copy, component-for-component, so I used a Minimoog schematic to help troubleshoot the problem.
The Mellotron is mine and has undergone quite a bit of work. New pinch rollers, new motor control board, rebuilt the PSU, and fabbed a new key as one was missing.”
