Re: the boy who gazed at stars
2002-12-30 by sdavmor
Philip James Johnston wrote: >>I must say this before Mike takes offense at anyone thinking the >>tron on this track was him! <rolls eyes> I confess I am the >>culprit. It is 100% "sampletron", as is "Under Oriental Skies", >>created by me in Cool Edit Pro using Mike Pinder's exellent Akai >>Mellotron/Chamberlin samples, and several Direct X plugins. > > > > > Hi there! > > Oh my god!!!! Those are samples, there goes my Tron credibility. Yours and every in-print reviewer who's heard the disk. :-) I will take your amazed admission of being fooled as a compliment of the highest order to the obsessive bit-twiddling I did three years ago. > Apologies to Mike for any offence he might feel from such an error. I'm having a bit of fun with you. I'm sure Mike will just laugh at the success of my digital trickery, and be the first to tell you that those sampletron parts are very well done...but they're still samples...and he can spot 'em a mile away! I'll cop to it in advance. > But hey, It's still a great Mellotron moment all the same, sample or > no sample. Thankyou. I think so too. But one day the "real thing" will be heard when we rework the tune properly, and that will be even cooler IMO. A couple of years back I was chauffeuring three of the NEARFest folks at high speed from ProgFest 2001 to a club where Under The Sun were playing. (They wanted to audition them for NEARFest 2002). Rob La Duca commented that he loved the 'tron on "TBWGAS". I smiled and kept my mouth shut. > I'deen told by a few people that the Pinder CD Rom wasn't > all that great, but after hearing this & 'She Who is of The Lord' by > Frank Samaggio(!)I'm not so sure... It fooled me. I think a lot of it has to do with how the samples were used, and what was also there in the mix working with the sampletron. Me feeling, not owning a tron, is that the Pinder rom is very good. I didn't have a "sampling keyboard" available to me, and was clueless as to how the samples could be MIDI triggered (now I have M-tron), so I used my noggin' and the tools at my disposal to get the sound in my head into the tune. IIRC I used Mk II strings, because I liked the bite more in this piece than the lusher Chamberlin strings that I used in "UOS" (soaked in "Dreamverb", three samples stacked on top each other for depth, one dead center, one each panned 25% L&R). > Philip If you get Mike to lug his M400 to you to use for a session, do it. Ain't nothing' like the real thing, baby! Mike's 'tron work on our new batch of tunes is superb. Part of it is the player, but part of it is that his M400 is lovingly cared for, so the sounds it can provide are brilliant. As he once said, sometime you play the Mellotron, and sometimes (when it's at its magic best, I guess) it plays you. <nods> -- Cheers, SDM -- a 21st century schizoid man http://systemstheory.net internet music project http://thecleanersystem.com software for dry cleaners NP: nothing