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I can't believe you are serious Mike. My piano teacher'sSteinway is the only instrument I would consider swapping my mellotronfor. The amount of control you have over the sound is amazing, youwould have to have hundreds of samples per note to duplicate the sound.
I wasn't suggesting sampling a Steinway on a Mellotron, for crying outloud! I think we were talking at cross purposes.
Incidentally, when Technics brought out their digitally sampled piano(FX-1? I forget now) in the 1980s it was a pretty good approximation of'the real thing', even then. They sampled a Steinway too. The sampledevery note at 17 different rates of velocity to build a very completepicture of the instrument. They housed it in dummy casework andattached dummy hammers to the weighted keys so it even felt likethe real thing. Reportedly they spent hundreds of thousands of dollarsin researching this to see how to record the piano, how many differenttimbres it had, how the samples should be stored etc etc. And yes, itsounded 'real'. However, it sounded exactly like a Steinway thatyou had your head pressed up against. Every key had been closemiked to get every last possible nuance of sound which meant that whenyou played it back it sounded like a close miked Steinway. They hadforgotten that so much of a piano's sound is in the room where it isplayed, and adding that digitally (then) was next to impossible. Inseeking the perfect sampler they had invented the world's most absurdsounding piano.
With the new mellotron there will be no difference so whybother replicating the keyboard ( my dislike of the action being justmy honest opinion) and making it look like a mellotron which it isn't.Other than the obvious point of making it sell. It is just a veryexpensive device to play back samples.
It's an expensive device to play back very specific samples.Plus it looks like the real thing too, in some measure. Personally, Ireckon he will sell about a dozen of them, though I may be wrong. Whois it aimed at? The Mellotron freaks and purists won't want one because'it's a sampler', and the normal people out there who just want thesounds will take one look at this, one look at the M-Tron and thenanother look at the (free) Red-Tron. I'm certain I know which I wouldgo for. (Having played with it for a couple of days now, I think theRed-Tron sounds better than the M-Tron!) As Mattias said, people justwant the sounds. It could come in a plywood box, a plastic box or abunch of pixels and electrical impulses on a PC. Generally speaking,who cares? If people were such purists then the M-Tron would not havesold ten copies, it sounds that bad. But most people don't know thedifference.http://www.mikedickson.org.uk/private/V4S-1.mp3
PS I know it wasn't your post but the Steinway is about asmuch use for rock music as the mellotron is for baroque.
http://www.mikedickson.org.uk/mellotronworks/04%20Air%20on%20the%20G%20String.mp3
Mike