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Re: Mellotrons for the masses [message #301538 is a reply to message #301533 ]

Mon, 31 December 2007 16:43

Doug Rogers
Messages: 171
Registered: January 2006
Location: Los Angeles

Active Member

RSettee wrote on Mon, 31 December 2007 21:57

To me, though, it doesn't matter whether things are dated--at one point, the Mellotron was horribly outdated and many sought to rid themselves of the unreliability of it.

Here's why it matters ...

When the Mellotron was introduced, it was the first popular sample playback system. You had one velocity, no articulations - that's what you got - limited by the technology of the day.

Then came the Fairlights, Synclaviers, Akai, Emu etc. They were digital, still pretty limited, and some of the more sophisticated units were hellishly expensive ($350K for a fully loaded Synclavier). By today's standards they are a complete joke!

Expressive samples were still missing. Computers couldn't play more than 2 voices at the time due to 'latency', that's why musicians mortgaged their homes to buy Fairlights and Synclaviers. These have a sound also, "The Art Of Noise" is a great example of the early Fairlight sound. Akai/Emu provided cheaper solutions with limitations, but it still took them several years to go from 12-bit to 16-bit (today, 24-bit is standard).

We actually released a 'five star' awarded Steinway Piano library in 1995 that had "2 velocity layers" that required "2 Akai samplers" to play all 32Mbs!! This is when the library Korg licensed was created. The audio suffered also as the converters in the Akai samplers, which it was initially made for, were crap, resulting in a hard sound. In those days, no one was thinking 16 velocity layers and dozens of articulations because nothing could play them.

The breakthrough came in 1997 with the release of GigaSampler, the first software sampler that could stream gigabytes of data from a hard drive, all made possible by a very clever use of the ram buffer to overcome latency. My company introduced that technology to the market in 1998. That provided the framework for todays virtual instruments. Our platinum orchestra library for example is 138 gigabytes in size - 10 years before it would have been a pipedream to play this. This amount of data is required to provide all of the expression and dynamics orchestral composers require.

In your case, orchestral sounds are not the focus of your music, guitars are, but IMO, your track would sound a whole lot better with our orchestral virtual instrument doing the string parts. The Gold version of our orchestra library is pretty inexpensive and requires moderate computing power, if you get it, and don't think it improves your track, I'll give you your money back.

- DR

Recording Engineering & Production: Making records better, not just louder and cheaper. The brightest minds from the creative and scientific world of audio discuss the elements of audio production that interest you most.

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