Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Mellotronists

<< With a close mic, a couple room mics, and some mics in the hallway [snip]
Has anyone made tape racks (recently) from this type of approach?>>

back in the mists of time, & before there was such excellent support for the
remaining mellotrons, I had just one slightly mouldy tapeset in my 400. it
occurred to me to try some loops of 1/4" in there, with some 'tron-like sounds
from my sample library. I knew edgar froese had done something like this in
1977.

up until this point, I had been becoming expert at recreating the
idiosyncracies of the mellotron using samplers, & I used to sample everything from 1/4"
anyway for added authenticity.
with modern samplers & romplers, it's a lot easier to do things like, say,
use a tiny bit of noise-modulation to vary the pitch &/or amplitude of a sample,
to reproduce the random quirks of tape replay. used sparingly, these sorts of
technique can make a sampler sound a lot less sterile anyway.

but I digress. the loops of 1/4" wobbled about in the 3/8" tape guides &
would continue to do so if I didn't secure them in my one & only tapeframe. the
looping part was really just because there was no other way to mount the tape
without doing this- the edits were pants, by my high standards. so I cleaned my
mouldy tapes instead (meths, since you ask- a heavyish fraction of alcohol,
less volatile than head-cleaner) & made the best of what I had.

I even asked a colleague at work if he knew anything about the BBC machines &
whether they had ever had their own tape-maker.....

much later on (1993 maybe), I discovered streetly & bought more frames, + a
1/4" comb kit. since then, on several occasions, I've loaded 1098 with 1/4"
tapes with various noises on them. oddly, though, the replay path in the machine
(which runs at 7-1/2 ips, by the way), is almost too good, & the anticpiated
"tronification" of the sounds is not as apparent as one might expect.
& the new sounds being supplied ready-made sound a lot less "tronny" than new
copies of older tapesets too.

I've had a lot more "success", if you want to call it that, in producing what
is commonly held to be a mellotron-like effect by doctoring samples with 1/4"
transfers & the various modulation techniques I've mentioned here & in the
past. the proteus 2000 synth module, if you can get y'r own samples into it
(torture!) or the alesis q-synth series (not much memory for samples, but ok
nevertheless) are well-equipped for modulation madness. I expect the korg triton
would be reasonably good, though it's mod matrix is more basic. don't know about
the yamaha samplers, & I don't use computers as instruments....

hth-
duncan/r.m.i./400 nr 1098 (no longer creaking under the weight of the cs50)