Buchla Box

Fast Facts

On June 14, 1964, author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and 13 Merry Pranksters boarded a bus at Kesey's ranch in La Honda, California, and set off eastward to New York  to visit the 1964 World's Fair. The Pranksters were enthusiastic users of marijuana, amphetamines and LSD and throughout their journey, they are said to have "turned on" many people by introducing them to LSD, which was still legal in the US at the time. The psychedelically painted bus, named Further, had a PA system that allowed the Pranksters to broadcast their "trip" from loudspeakers.

NMC's artifact is the amplifier of that system built by synthesizer guru and Merry Prankster member Don Buchla.

ARP 2500 Synthesizer

Fast Facts

NMC’s ARP 2500 was the instrument used to communicate with the aliens in the motion picture Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The ARP 2500, built from 1970 through the mid-’70s, was ARP's first big synthesizer. A monophonic analog modular synthesizer equipped with a set of matrix switches to connect modules in addition to the more common patch cords.  The 2500 was not commercially successful, selling approximately 100 units of which about only 50 remain in the world.

NMC acquired this very rare instrument, probably the last 2500 ever made, in 2008 from a private collector in Los Angeles who bought it from Lucasfilm.

Pop Culture Reference

Other than its most famous appearance in Close Encounters, the ARP 2500 has been used by musicians like Meat Beat Manifesto, The Who, David Bowie, Skinny Puppy, Jean Michel Jarre, and Vince Clarke. In the classical world, electronic composer Elaine Radique has worked almost exclusively with the 2500.

Acrylic Mellotron M400

Fast Facts

The Mellotron is an electro-mechanical, polyphonic keyboard originally developed and built in Birmingham, England in the early 1960s. It superseded the Chamberlin, which was the world's first sample-playback keyboard. The heart of the instrument is a bank of parallel linear magnetic audio tapes, which have approximately eight seconds of playing time each. Playback heads underneath each key enable the playing of pre-recorded sounds.

NMC’s extremely rare clear Mellotron is one of only three – maybe even two – in the world. This clear Perspex-case Mellotron was developed in England in 1972 for the London Music Expo to allow listeners to see how the tape replay mechanism works inside the instrument.

This machine was stolen from Mellotron Digital in 1986 while on display in New York and resurfaced in 1990 in Dallas Texas in a studio called "Dr. Funkenstein’s Music Lab".

A Fort Worth radio D.J. named Brian Wilson sold it to  David Kean in May 1991. NMC acquired the instrument in 2002.  The National Music Centre also has an extensive collection of Mellotron tapes.

Pop Culture Reference

The Mellotron is used prominently in The Beatles’ "Strawberry Fields Forever” and the Moody Blues’ "Nights in White Satin" and "Tuesday Afternoon”.  You can also hear the Mellotron in Marvin Gaye’s "Mercy Mercy Me" and Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film).