Mark Pring wrote:
I can't believe you are serious Mike. My piano teacher's Steinway is the only instrument I would consider swapping my mellotron for. The amount of control you have over the sound is amazing, you would have to have hundreds of samples per note to duplicate the sound.
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I wasn't suggesting sampling a Steinway on a Mellotron, for crying out loud! 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 sampled every note at 17 different rates of velocity to build a very complete picture of the instrument. They housed it in dummy casework and attached dummy hammers to the weighted keys so it even
felt like the real thing. Reportedly they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in researching this to see how to record the piano, how many different timbres it had, how the samples should be stored etc etc. And yes, it sounded 'real'. However, it sounded exactly like a Steinway
that you had your head pressed up against. Every key had been close miked to get every last possible nuance of sound which meant that when you played it back it sounded like a close miked Steinway. They had forgotten that so much of a piano's sound is in the room where it is played, and adding that digitally (then) was next to impossible. In seeking the perfect sampler they had invented the world's most absurd sounding piano.
With the new mellotron there will be no difference so why bother replicating the keyboard ( my dislike of the action being just my 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 very expensive 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, I reckon he will sell about a dozen of them, though I may be wrong. Who is 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 the sounds will take one look at this, one look at the M-Tron and then another look at the (free) Red-Tron. I'm certain I know which I would go for. (Having played with it for a couple of days now, I think the Red-Tron sounds better than the M-Tron!) As Mattias said, people just want the sounds. It could come in a plywood box, a plastic box or a bunch of pixels and electrical impulses on a PC. Generally speaking, who cares? If people were such purists then the M-Tron would not have sold ten copies, it sounds that bad. But most people don't know the difference.
PS I know it wasn't your post but the Steinway is about as much use for rock music as the mellotron is for baroque. |
http://www.mikedick son.org.uk/ private/V4S- 1.mp3http://www.mikedick son.org.uk/ mellotronworks/ 04%20Air% 20on%20the% 20G%20String. mp3Mike