Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Mellotronists

So my Orchestron search has come to fruition (fingers crossed) and I should have it in
about a month, and I got to thinking about the sound discs for optical instruments. I
know a lot of people on this site may kind of poo poo these instruments as cheap,
crappy imitations of the Mellotron and Chamberlin, but, nonetheless, they are close
relatives in a very small family, so its worth a little discussion. Here's my thought: If
you look at the available sounds for the Mellotron and Chamberlin, there's really an
adequate collection of tape sets available. To me it seems that they got to the point
where they had made every recording that made sense, and even crossed over into
the sort of ridiculous (for instance, I seem to remember that I can buy a tape set for
my Mellotron of Jack Bruce's voice). When you look at the Orchestron, however, the
offerings are very limited (eight discs). They cover the basics, but nothing complex,
and they don't have things like "3 violins" vs. "violin" like the mellotron, where you can
really get a diverse and specific group of sounds. Checking out the optigan website, I
found that, with the exception of a saxaphone disc, a choir disc, and a ridiculous
sounding marimba disc, everything is organ organ organ. I personally feel that the
chord accompaniments on the optigan (I don't have one, but I was thinking of getting
one, and listened to a bunch of sound files) are almost completely unusable unless
you are making a very specific kind of lo-fi, ironic, post-modern kind of music--
essentially, unusable as an actual musical instrument, only as a gimmick. It seems as
though a solid combo organ could really take the place of an optigan in almost any
situation. SO, I got to thinking, here is this technology, and, at least in the case of the
optigan, here are these plentifully available, cheap "analog sampling instruments",
which have a cool character to the sound (I know everyone on this board can
appreciate that, otherwise we'd all just have Korg Tritons, or whatever they're called),
and why wouldn't someone go out and get session musicians and make discs that
were actually usable? Forget the chord button accompaniment stuff--why not record
an actual symphony, brass section, choir, etc. and make a disc of those sounds for the
optigan keyboard? It has to be possible to still make these discs somehow, and, at
least in my humble opinion, there's a market for them. I mean, you can't tell me that
if you could play samples of cool sounds on the optigan, that there aren't a lot of
people into vintage keyboards that wouldn't shell out their 200 bucks for an optigan
and start using those sounds. Has anyone looked into this, or know anyone who has?
Any thoughts on this?

Max