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On 06/11/2010 23:03, Rick Blechta wrote:
Case in point: the Ian McDonald flute. It is an incredibly flexible, utterly delightful voice. Why? Because the person who created it understands what a mellotron is.
Good point, that. However, played through a sampler would it make it any different? I still maintain a lot of what makes samplers and Mellotron's 'different' is that in the former case people with no sense of musicality or timbre make all kinds of business decisions about the tunings, the attacks, noise reduction, gain etc so that it totally ruins the effect. I have sampled #996's first frame (strings/choir/flute) and made absolutely no attempt to do anything to the sounds other than chop them up and apply them to a sampler. In all candour, you'd never know the difference other than the fact that the sounds are very consistent. I still think the M-Tron is one of the biggest abortions I've heard in ages. Not only can I tell a real Mellotron a mile off, I can also tell when someone has been using that particular library.
Another example is Steve Hackett's guitar. I'd never have believed it possible that a sustained guitar would be so much fun to play.
Ian's flute has something in common with the Wilden Pipe Organ, the new oboe/cor anglais and (to some extent) the new cello and viola sounds too. They are all recorded with attention paid to the attack. Most sampler libraries do not have that kind of attention to detail and expect the sound to be full on the second the key is depressed. Sadly, that was also a 'mistake' made with some of the old sounds too. The Mk II brass has to be one of the worst, with no real attention paid to balance, to attack and none to the blend used. (Sax? Why not French Horn?!) But it sounds like a Mellotron. So people will buy it. It's a pity we don't have enough new sounds to put together a new brass section. I'll bet it will sound good. I also bet hardly anyone would buy it.
It seems to me that you're living in the past. You're trying to turn this instrument into a museum.
Good point also. I see the whole sound library as an organic entity, which grows according to need. Or I did, anyway. But now I am wondering just how many of these sounds are finding their way anywhere beyond my web site. Or are people wanting the Mellotron for the strings/choir/flute/brass/cello axis alone?
Case in point: when my old band from the '70s got together in 2001 to just "do a gig for the hell of it", I was equipped with a full 36-voice FX console. They'd been used to the same instrument, but with 400 tapes in it (6 sounds). At our first rehearsal, we were farting around with some of the cover songs we'd decided to play for our first set. One was "In the Court of the Crimson King". I used the MkII violins until the end of the song, then cycled to Les Bradley's "Orchestra" mix. The band stopped dead in their tracks. The singer looked at me and asked, "Holy shit! Have you been feeding that thing, steroids?"
Kind of. The orchestra is (if I am not mistaken) Mk II brass, string section and woodwind, which are all old sounds. It will still sound 'like a Mellotron' because the sounds are all still based on things you'd have heard from the past.
Maybe Mike did too good a job with his recording of the new pipe organ voice. It does sound incredibly real, but that's probably what he was going for.
Sure. The sounds are doubled (to make it sound more like a pipe organ) and the bottom end borrows a bass pedal from elsewhere. It sounds very real.
For some reason, throw a bunch of magnetic tape on one of these ridiculous machines and something magical happens. That's what I love about them -- and I'm sure I'm not alone.
You're not. I find magnetic tape to be continually fascinating stuff. It does things to sounds that nothing else can.
Mike