Hi Brady:
>
> I can believe it's not a Mellotron, because this sounds BETTER
than a Mellotron! Yet, it does have a Tronish quality to it --
which is a neat orgainic thing in this digital age. Its sort of a
21st Century Bitzoid Tron. Can you tell us more about how you did
this. WHAT sampler did you use? Did you use some sort of
processing to make it sound more Tron like? How many individual
samples are involved? How long are the samples? Is there any
looping being used? Nice sounding stuff!
>
> Thanks,
> Babz
Hi Babz,
I first just wanted to start by extracting all the sustained
notes I could find out of these violin pieces... I was searching
everywhere to find as many of them as I could, witch ended up being
a total of 98 notes (.wav files). When I did the mix, I put a bit
of hall reverb on the dry notes to make them match the other notes
that where pre-mixed with reverb (by those who engineered the
original solo violin pieces), this was done to create a bit more
consistentsy between all the notes. Believe it or not I did not use
any sort of processing to make these sound more tron-like, just some
good ole fashsion EQ, and a lite touch of compression. The mix was
done on Sonic Foundry Vegas 4.0 (Audio / Video production) software.
In order to achive the 8 second long sample length, I did have to
loop all the violin notes (hey, nobody performing a solo piece wants
to hold a note for 8 seconds he he), but because there are three
violins in the mix (with all different sample lengths) the loops
never occoured right at the same time, thus giving the illusion that
there is no loop. Another cool thing with the software I was using,
I was able to do "fade looping" witch helped me to easily avoid the
unwanted click / pop noise you get from standard looping. After the
mix I ended up with 33 notes, missing only the g3, and d#5 keys
witch gave me enough to work with. For those missing notes, I just
used the notes next to them. I am still searching for those notes.
As far as the sampler, I used Virtual sampler 2.7 (on my PC) with
a midi controller to play the sounds. Vsampler is the greatest toy
that I have found for myself so far this year. It gave me more of
an excuse to collect (and create) as many Mellotron samples as
possible! I think I'm up to something like 4 Gigs (4,000 MB) of
Mellotron samples now, including alot of sounds from the MKII.
Cheers. -Brady