Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Mellotronists

Hi everybody!

I had a sudden and nearly painful burst of inspiration I'd like to
share with you all! Some of you may have noted that I have a lot of
fun programming my beloved little Korg X5D synths with homebrewed
Mellotron patches, with compulsive attention to detail.

In the last two weeks, my band has debuted our arrangement of Led
Zeppelin's "The Rain Song" and it is a pretty faithful reproduction
of the studio version. I built a Multi program in the Korg with my
fake 3-violins in the left hand and my fake cello in the right hand,
and volume control via my CV pedal.

I'm extremely proud to say that the arrangement is stupendous, and
the crowd response thus far has been largely one of stunned amazement.

Still, I wasn't quite happy with my parts, largely because of the
noticeable Mellotron tuning quirks present in the original that
weren't showing up in my digitally exact-tuned synthesizer.

Well, sitting in my car and listening to the original, I suddenly
remembered that my Korgs have several preset scale temperaments and
even have a user-defined scale memory slot.

I ran back to my Korg, switched from the standard "equal temperament"
tuning over to "equal temperament 2" (I still haven't looked into the
manual to determine what the actual difference is) and found that it
gave me a nice bit of a detuned feel, as does the "pythagorean" scale
mode. I am now in the process of experimenting with a user-defined
scale mode to use for all of my ersatz Mellotron sounds, and knowing
that many of you have used samples, synths, and other methods of
trying to capture the feel of the real thing, I wanted to share this
wonderful and simple-to-implement means of giving your reproduction a
little more of the character of the real thing!