> > The choir and strings are really frightening," Wakeman gushed
Frighteningly bad, more like. I've heard the masters and they are
actually quite good recordings. The problem is that once they are in the
Birotron they seem to lose all their EQ qualities, possibly because they
didn't have any way of adjusting the head tracking. You can disguise it
a bit by tweaking up the EQ on the mixer (which mostly has the effect of
simply upping the white noise ratio) and reverbing -the hell- out of it,
but that's about it. An A/B between the source sounds and the instrument
shows it up badly.
> > You can program different kinds of attack and sustain
Oh hardly! What passes for 'attack and sustain' are actually more like
'fade in and fade out'. Actual 'attack' simply doesn't exist on this
instrument at all.
> > the keyboard is light; you can play as fast as you like, which you
> > can't do on the Mellotron."
I disagree with this as well. The keyboard isn;t light at all. It's not
a ton weight like the Tron, but it's hardly a Hammond. True, it's
lighter because all it is doing is making a circuit through which the
endless loop can make itself heard, but the spring mechanism that keeps
the keys up seems to be made of coiled steel. Not only is this a bit
tiing to play, it's not made any easier by the key action being very low
in terms of contact; there is a point on a Hammond where the note plays,
beyond which the rest is simply the wire flexing on the busbars. The
action on the Biro (to me, anyway) seemed to be entirely on the bottom
of the playing distance. Horrible!
Mike Dickson (
tron@...) M400 #996
The Official Cynic of Streetly Electronics
Streetly Sample Library
http://www.blackcat.demon.co.uk/tron/