MATRIXSYNTH: STYLOPHONE


Tuesday, June 10, 2008

STYLOPHONE


via this auction. box shot.

"The Stylophone was made popular in David Bowie's Space Oddity and is making a resurgence in "retro" rock music."

Anyone confirm this?


7 comments:

  1. The Bowie thing is true, if that's what you mean. It's the cello-ish whole-note line under the verses (Ground Control to Major Tom, etc.) I don't remember model numbers and dates and such, but there were several types of Stylophones made and some models had direct outs you could connect to your mixing console.

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  2. Yeah, that's what I was wondering. Awesome. Thanks!

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  3. May I add that in Space Oddity the little glissando bit that goes up right before the guitar solo is also the Stylophone (2:34 in this vid - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhSYbRiYwTY . It would be very difficlut to perform on any other instrument witht the exception of maybe one of those Buchla Music Easels or the Thunderbird controller thing.

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  4. Davetron, I always wondered what the heck that was... for a long time I thought it had been done with the touch keyboard on a Synthi-A, but that wouldn't have produced the same result since it has a conventional layout of black and white keys in separate rows. You can't make one contact point cross both rows.

    Mellotron and Stylophone on the same track... who would've thought...

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. A less well-known user of the Stylophone was Dave Ball of Soft Cell.

    Dave used the regular Rolf Harris one & the big one with 2 styli on their early demos back in 1979-80.

    ReplyDelete

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