The Mellotron Group

My keyboard action still feels okay too despite having been given a complete battering over the last two years. I know it needs a service, but the action feels okay to me. As for 'sponginess', I've played a MemoryMoog and found that had the weirdest action I've ever felt in a keyboard. There is the contact...and there is a bit more afterwards that doesn't do anything. It's just a matter of getting used to what you're dealing with. Mellotron keyboards run on wood, rubber and sprung metal. It's never going to rock-solid on that basis, but by no means is it as heavy as (say) a Birotron (which has keys that feel like they were weighted on leaf springs) or some of the more revolting plasticky things that troubled us in the 1980s.

What I positively like about the touch on a Hammond or a Mellotron or (direct action) pipe organ is the feeling that you are part of the machine. You can either feel the mechanics of the system under your fingertips. There is a bit of work involved there perhaps, but I don't mind it as much as I mind the feeling that I'm simply playing a series of rather dead digital switches.

As for samples and MIDI, they have their place. They make a lot of things a lot easier and have obviously opened doors to many many things that were previously impossible to encompass, but to me they just play back with monotonous regularity. I've been messing about a little with that RedTron plugin and frankly the Mk-V version (for some reason) sounds better, for some reason. The problem is that the samples are lousy and there is really no way round that. Okay, so Mellotrons have their off days too (as we all know) but they get better. With this, you're stuck with a picture of what someone else thought sounded great. It's like the difference between making an Airfix kit aeroplane model and a balsa model. With one you are tied to other people's ideas and that (to me) is limiting.

Having said all that, I'll qualify it by saying that I've sampled 3-violins myself and I'd defy anyone to A/B a scale of it and the M400 whence it came and tell the difference. I just didn't treat the samples at all. Someone might learn this trick one day. We'll see.

Mike


fdoddy@aol.com wrote: