The Meinl-Weston / Melton Brand Names:
Here we would like to explain
the sense of our brand names - combined with some excerpts of
the company's history:
Up until the second world war, musical instruments in the bohemian-saxonian
musical area, were published like sheet music meaning that a
manufacturer's name was quite rare as an engraving on an instrument.
Also there were 
so
many Meinls in Graslitz and in the west after the war,
so Anton Meinl decided to create a new brand name for the instruments
made by the Wenzel Meinl GmbH - and that is how the Melton
name was born, which means “Meinl tone”.
In 1957 the first Melton Logo was created including the line
"Metallblasinstrumente", translated: "brasswind
instruments". It was also planned that our own distribution
company in the USA (later to be taken over by the Getzen company,
see below) should of course use the same name, but unfortunately
a flower company had registered the name Melton so a new name
had to be thought out for the U.S.
It was a very happy gathering
(including Bill Bell and Anton Meinl) at a round table where
the name Meinl-Weston was created. By the way, there was
never a Mr. Weston - in the times of the cold war the name Meinl-Weston
was chosen to indicate that this was truly a product of the west,
so as to draw a clear line with the competition from the east,
where companies previously owned by our fathers had been taken
over by the state in communist times.
It
wasn’t until the 1980’s when the Melton Logo received
a new design - again with the image of the Tuba endorsing it
(the Tuba on the logo by the way is our model 25) and at the
same time, a similar logo was created for Meinl-Weston to emphasize
the same identity, although the brand names, marketing and logos
were always used separately until the 1990's: instruments for
Europe, Australia, Korea and Taiwan are engraved with Melton,
instruments for the U.S. and Japan and several other countries
are engraved with the Meinl-Weston name.
In the late 1990's, when the
world got smaller, the separate usage of both brand names obviously
created some confusion amongst the travelling musicians. As a
reaction to this the two brand names of Melton and Meinl-Weston
were put together side-by-side for all publications of the Wenzel
Meinl GmbH to emphasize that the only difference in the different
brands is the engraving, nothing else - you can expect the same
playing qualities whether it is a Meinl-Weston or a Melton instrument!
On some older instruments within the U.S., you might still find the sub-title “A Division of Getzen” under the Meinl-Weston engraving on the bell, and here is why: when the Getzen company took over the distribution of Meinl-Weston in the USA in the late 1960’s, they added that sub-title. Although the Wenzel Meinl GmbH was never a department of the Getzen company, (Meinl-Weston was merely one of the products which they distributed) the synergies and friendship between the two companies lasted throughout various owners of Getzen and continue still today.
Gerhard A. Meinl