Mellotronists

ferrograph@... wrote:
> << I've always thought that the result of an analog summing buss is much more 
> 'natural' sounding than digital.
> My guess is that the upper harmonics are more fairly represented in the 
> analog sum. >>
> 
> ah... time to chip in, I think, given the number of samplers & romplers I've 
> used in the same room or on the same stage as my old 400 & it's nine frames.
> 
> emu have had a few goes at capturing the mellotron, most recently just before 
> they stopped making anything useful, in the proteus "vintage keys" rom. I 
> think it's 32Mb total, but there're a zillion synths, e-pianos & clavs on there 
> aswell. obviously, it sucks, but not quite as badly as their earlier efforts. 
> I've never used their cd, or the pinder, though I do have the hilarious 
> propellor island disc somewhere.
> I also have a few alesis boxes- quadrasynths.... they had a "vintage" rom 
> card too. 8Mb. must've seemed like a lot at one point, back in the late 80s 
> perhaps.
> 
> anyway, what with this parlous state of affairs, the practical problems & 
> general unwillingness to schlepp the precious 400 itself, & a bad experience with 
> a hard-drive right before a gig, I decided to go down the flash-ram route & 
> sample my own frames for live-use.
> 
> first, the alesis. 
> 
> actually, no, forget that. this sort of reminiscing is contra-indicated by 
> modern psycho-therapy. suffice to say that even one 'tron sound can't be fairly 
> represented by the 8Mb card. I gave it my best shot.
> 
> the emu, on the other hand.... the proteus series can accommodate up to 4 
> 32Mb flash ram sticks, but you need one of their top-of-the-range samplers to 
> make them with. I have done this, with the e6400 ultra sitting right next to 1098 
> & just a guitar lead between them. I have the sounds from 6 frames on one 
> stick, this by dint of sampling every second or third note & then downsampling to 
> reduce the required memory. obviously, you can downsample some sounds more 
> than others, so I'd a-b each sample to see what I could get away with. I 
> doctored one patch to have clarinet & bass clarinet combined, with the split almost 
> inaudible. my church organ splits into the same tapes running at half-speed. & 
> so on. no looping, so some of them run out at less than 8 seconds.
> 
> once the basic patches are assembled in the sampler, you blow them onto the 
> ram stick & put this into a proteus box. this is where the fun starts. the 
> proteus line are very complex little romplers &, with lots of programming, are 
> capable of great things. sadly, most users just dialled up presets & never dug 
> deeper. 
> I created a basic patch for mellotron sounds, & have found that the same 
> patch makes other samples sound a bit "tronny" too. it uses one layer, no 
> chorussing, no filtering (except for my "phaedra" tron-through-lfo'd-vcf patch) & a 
> gated vca. once this generic patch is built, I just load a different set of 
> samples into it, rename it & move onto the next.
> 
> so the emu just plays the sample exactly as it was recorded? no. it sounds a 
> bit lifeless like that, as has been noted, & especially so when you play a 
> chord. 
> hmm.... how to fix this? well, without hooking up my oscilloscope, I can 
> confirm that playing a chord on the real thing is very different than playing the 
> same notes back all at once from a sampler or rompler. it's louder. 
> 
> maybe the sampler has some logic that reduces the level depending how many 
> voices are active- this'd make sense, since these things are expected to deliver 
> 64 or 128 synth channels through a single stereo output; that's a hell of a 
> dynamic range. each additional note raises the level by up to 3dB on the 
> tron..... so paradoxically, we have to ride the level more with the samples than 
> with the real thing.
> 
> some sounds are just plain shrill if you play chords; the pre-amp in my 400 
> is certainly being overdriven. figures, though- oboes are like that in real 
> life too, & they're not supposed to play chords anyway. 
> 
> single notes seem to sound the same, more-or-less, from the sampler or the 
> real thing. but as soon as you play two keys on the tron, all sorts of new 
> variables come into play... vibrations up & down the capstan from uneven pinch 
> rollers? extra load on the motor? I spent a few hours investigating this, then set 
> to work on the proteus.
> 
> the patch I've ended up with uses small (really small) amounts of pink noise 
> & other random control sources to vary pitch & amplitude. I also modulate the 
> start-point of the sample to simulate incomplete rewinds using velocity 
> control. aftertouch (channel pressure) is used to lower the pitch by a tiny amount- 
> you really have to lean on an sms equipped 400 to make it sound like a cmc 
> 400, but it still happens, so it's in the patch. someone actually noticed this at 
> a gig a few weeks back. I have even used a "key-random" mod source to switch 
> between two different samples of the same note... I have some duplicate sounds 
> amongst my frames, & wanted both versions to be represented.
> where I've used the same sample for two notes, one of them will have it's 
> timbre & other attributes altered by the proteus. 
> the whole patch also takes advantage of the user-tuning tables available in 
> the proteus; you can make microtonal adjustments across the keyboard so the 
> tron patch is perfectly out-of-tune. or not.
> 
> I've been at this for 14 years now, with as many samplers/romplers, & this is 
> as close as I've managed to get. we still use the real thing in the studio, 
> but I can live with the sampled versions I've made in there or on stage. the 
> same techniques will work to some degree on other boxes; I went with the proteus 
> because I could get multiples of 32Mb into a 1U box with all this programming 
> capability & not have to worry about carrying a hard-drive around.
> 
> duncan/r.m.i./400 nr1098

This is a great (informative) post, Duncan.  I really enjoyed reading it.
-- 
Cheers,
SDM -- a 21st century schizoid man
Systems Theory internet music project links:
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