Michael Pinder

Michael Pinder established himself as an important rock musician in his work with the Moody Blues during the height of their success. However, his greatest contributions to music may have been technological.

Related Topics:
Michael Pinder - Moody Blues

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Michael Thomas Pinder was born December 27, 1941 to Bert and Gladys Pinder in Birmingham, England. As a young adult Pinder played in El Riot and the Rebels, a rock band that achieved some regional success. Bandmates in El Riot included future Moody Blues members Ray Thomas and John Lodge. Later, Pinder and Thomas played together in a band called the Krew Cats or Crew Cats; the band wound up in Germany playing at some of the cellars where The Beatles had polished their musicianship; however the Krew Cats' fortunes were not so bright--Pinder and Thomas, completely broke, wound up walking across northern Europe to get back home to England.

Related Topics:
December 27 - 1941 - El Riot and the Rebels - Ray Thomas - John Lodge - The Beatles

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Around this time, Pinder wound up employed by Streetly Electronics, a firm that manufactured the mellotron. The mellotron was a keyboard instrument that produced sound when each key pressed a magnetic tape head onto a short strip of magnetic tape. The tapes could be recorded with any desired sound, so a mellotron could be configured to sound like a symphony orchestra, a full choir, or any other instrument or ensemble. In essence, the mellotron was the first "sampling" synthesizer. The instrument was limited in many ways: the length of the tape meant that no note could be sustained for more than seven seconds, after which the tape had to rewind; the sound was inevitably tinny and had a characteristic attack (which, while not a naturalistic sound, could be used to give the instrument a unique character); the complex mechanism made the instrument prone to mechanical failure.

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Pinder, Thomas, and members of other successful Birmingham bands formed The Moody Blues. After their chart hit "Go Now" in 1965, Pinder obtained a mellotron from Streetly and became the first artist to record using the instrument in the Moodies' single Love and Beauty. Subsequently, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, among others, used mellotron to reinforce their sound in studio recordings.

Related Topics:
The Moody Blues - The Rolling Stones

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Pinder was also the first notable musician to use the mellotron in live performance, relying on the mechanical skills garnered from his time with Streetly to keep the balky instrument in working order. Typical of his travails was the Moodies' first American performance; when the band struck its first harmony, the back of the mellotron fell open and all of the tape strips cascaded out. Pinder grabbed his tool box and got the instrument back into working order in 20 minutes, while the light crew entertained the audience by projecting Bugs Bunny cartoons.

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The Moody Blues split up in 1974 and Pinder relocated to California, releasing a solo album The Promise in 1976 through the Moodies' Threshold label. In 1977 the band decided to re-form, and Pinder collaborated on the 1978 release Octave. But his dissatisfaction with the group led to him refusing to tour in support of the album, and in 1979 he made his final departure from the band that bought him fame.

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Pinder took employment as a consultant to the Atari computer corporation (primarily working on music synthesis), remarried, and started a family in Grass Valley, California. He remained out of the public eye until the mid-1990s, when he began to grant interviews and to work on new recording projects. 1994 saw the release of his second solo album, Among the Stars, on his own One Step label, to limited success. Another One Step release, A Planet With One Mind (1995), capitalized on Pinder's experience as chief reciter of Graeme Edge's poetry on the seminal Moody Blues albums; in this recording, Pinder reads seven children's stories from different world cultures, accompanied by appropriate world music. As his first spoken word album, it was well received among its contemporaries in the genre--it was a finalist for the Benjamin Franklin Award for Excellence in Audio as an oustanding children's recording.

Related Topics:
Atari computer corporation - Grass Valley, California - Graeme Edge

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While he has not returned to the level of activity or ambition that marked his youth, Pinder since has continued to work in the studio on his own and others' projects, and to make himself available to his fans through interviews and web sites such as www.mikepinder.com

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