NAMM 2025: This year, a new possible Mellotron M4000D desktop unit has been spotted at the company’s NAMM booth.
NAMM 2025 belongs to the past, but news is still popping up here and there. For example, a reader of the Matrixsynth website discovered a new Mellotron product on the company’s booth.
More precisely, he discovered it in the Instagram story, which, unfortunately, is only online for 24 hours.
Mellotron M4000D Desktop
In both pictures from the Instagram story, you can clearly see a desktop device that has the same layout as the left side of the Mellotron M4000D or Micro hardware. It has two color displays, four knobs, and two switches.
The back seems to be a bit different. In addition to the classic outputs (main, sustain, phones), it has MIDI on a TRS basis.
I assume the sound content will be identical to the Micro version, which includes 100 24-bit uncompressed sounds from the original first-generation Mellotron and Chamberlin tape libraries.
If you’re wondering if Mellotron is working on a dedicated iOS app, it’s been around for a while and has the same name as the company. You can get it on the Apple AppStore for $1.99. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated since 2020 and doesn’t have AUv3 plugin support. I hope they will give the app more love in the future.
We will see whether the Mellotron M4000D desktop will come onto the market. There was no official announcement at NAMM. However, the photo could be an indirect announcement.
Mellotron M4000D desktop price and available are TBA.
More information will follow here: Mellotron
Mellotrons are available at my partner
The Swedish Mellotron company seems to have confused a lot of people. Both the dictionary definition and the Chamberlin patents that also apply to Mellotrons describe a Mellotron as a TAPE replay keyboard, meaning that if there are no tapes, it’s not a real Mellotron.