The Mellotron Group

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.
>

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.mikedickson.org.uk/private/V4S-1.mp3
http://www.mikedickson.org.uk/mellotronworks/04%20Air%20on%20the%20G%20String.mp3


Mike