A year after the Ondes Martenot was released, the Trautonium was released in Germany. This monophonic electronic device was invented by Friedrich Trautwein at the Rundfunkversuchstelle radio and music lab in Berlin.
Oskar Sala’s Mixtur-Trautonium.
Telefunken marketed the first Trautoniums in 1932 and produced 100 of them by 1935. The Trautonium had no keyboard but a resistor wire strung over a metal plate something like the Ondes Martenot and it ran on the same principle. Relaxation oscillators triggered first by neon tubes and then by thyratrons produced the raw sound in the form of sawtooth waves but later used transistors or UJT’s. The output of the oscillators was fed by parallel resonant filter circuits and the volume level of the two filters were controlled by footpedals. But this was not a poor man’s Ondes by any means; the Trautonium had a wider range of sounds.
Trautwein was joined by Oskar Sala. Sala added a switch for modifying the static tuning, then he added a noise generator and an envelope generator, then several band-pass filters and then subharmonic oscillators. Sala also added another manual. The oscillators did not play overtones but fractions of the overtones of the fundamental tone. Four waves could be produced and mixed for each of the two manuals and run through various presets. This device was called the Mixtur-Trautonium. Sala used this device to make the eerie bird noises in Hitchcock’s
The Birds.
Unfortunately, there are no virtuoso Trautonium performances currently on Youtube. Here’s a guy goofing off with one but at least you can hear what it’s capable of:
Old Trautonium I Sold A While Back - YouTube