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Subject: Compressed Mellotron

From: Mark Pring <markpringnz@yahoo.com>
Date: 2009-08-13

I have always found coping with raw ouput of my M400 somewhat challenging, particularly as I know very little about equalising and mixing. The tone control on my tron is broken, fortunately (?) set to high, being very lazy I can't be bothered to try and fix it. The output is fed through a modest Yamaha mixer and onto a very modest set of studio monitors and generally sounds quite good, although I can never quite get the sound I want. It sounds too much like violins!

The string sounds are really the only mellotron sounds that interest me and I have 2 sets of tapes, one has the Mark II 3 violins and the other the M300 violins ( is that 2?). I have gradually been weaning myself of excessive reverb as I like a rather percussive attacking sound. Recent posts about equalisation settings have been very useful.

I haven't ever used the simple compression function on the mixer until last night when I turned it on by accident, used sparingly it seems to make the tron sound a bit more clearly defined.

I might be wrong but I get the impression that compressing the sound is somewhat frowned upon in the group and I wonder why?

I would be interested in anyone's thoughts on this.

Cheers

Mark