Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Mellotronists

Mike, I'm glad that you've made this post. Since I've joined the board,
there hasn't seemed to be much room for discussing the pros and cons of
the M-tron. I fall into the category of those that would love to own a
'tron but currently can't afford one, what with Bush's economic miracle
and two boys bound for college, so I've had to content myself with the
M-tron.
I'm running on a pretty fast PC that I set up for animation and graphics
usage, so there's not been any real concession to audio output on this
machine. I'm using ASIO4ALL v2 as my audio driver and an EMU Xboard49
midi controller on which I've reassigned the pitch bend function to the
modulation wheel so you don't get an automatic return to zero when you
take your hand off of it. To be honest, I don't think that M-tron will
work with the standard midi pitch bender due to some odd decision made
by the M-tron software folks. While on this subject, I haven't been
able to find a midi channel that controls tape sound changes within the
software - something that should be quite easy to accomplish from the
keyboard. I'd have to say that Gmedia's midi assignments for M-tron are
questionable at best.

I have never played a 'tron, so I had nothing to compare to when I
started with the M-tron, and I was generally overjoyed to hear those
familiar sounds coming from a keyboard I was playing. It soon became
apparent (within fifteen minutes or so) that there was something not
quite right about the sound I was getting. A lot of the tape settings
were extremely noisy, some having a rumble on certain keys that was
quite audible, and the popping that you've described in the Flutes (
which was present in many of the sounds) was very irritating. I
believe that the popping is symptomatic of the settings of the audio
driver, as I've been able to dial most (if not all) of it out by setting
my buffer size to 1400+ samples - maybe others here have experience with
this. The noise in the tapes must be either bad tapes or poorly
maintained units. I can't see how any musician/producer/engineer would
have found this level of noise to be acceptable for studio recordings
and it doesn't seem to be something that could really be eq'd out of the
mix. The tuning on the flute does seem rather suspect - I've tried a
rather simple task like learning the 'tron part for Strawberry fields
and it seems that I'm constantly having to readjust the pitch while
playing (or maybe I'm just getting the notes wrong).

The choirs are not the strong presence that one would expect - overall
they seem quite muddy and I can't imagine a very good use for them at
this point. One of the MK II rhythm sounds has a note (down somewhere
around b) that plays backwards giving you that "revolver" feel.
Regarding the String Section, I've noticed that the start time of the
Cellos gets further out front the farther you go up the keyboard - so I
simply avoid this setting altogether - it's useless.

I wish the quality of the M-tron samples were better, but for someone in
my current situation with no professional justification for the cost of
the real thing (and no way to swing it even if the justification was
there), I'll have to continue to make do with M-tron for now (and be
glad that I've got it).

john barrick

PS - there aren't by any chance plans for a Streetly charity ward?