Mellotronists

Hi Brady:
> 
> I can believe it's not a Mellotron, because this sounds BETTER 
than a Mellotron!  Yet, it does have a Tronish quality to it -- 
which is a neat orgainic thing in this digital age.  Its sort of a 
21st Century Bitzoid Tron.  Can you tell us more about how you did 
this.  WHAT sampler did you use?  Did you use some sort of 
processing to make it sound more Tron like?  How many individual 
samples are involved?  How long are the samples? Is there any 
looping being used?  Nice sounding stuff!
> 
> Thanks,
> Babz
  
   Hi Babz,
   I first just wanted to start by extracting all the sustained 
notes I could find out of these violin pieces... I was searching 
everywhere to find as many of them as I could, witch ended up being 
a total of 98 notes (.wav files).  When I did the mix, I put a bit 
of hall reverb on the dry notes to make them match the other notes 
that where pre-mixed with reverb (by those who engineered the 
original solo violin pieces), this was done to create a bit more 
consistentsy between all the notes. Believe it or not I did not use 
any sort of processing to make these sound more tron-like, just some 
good ole fashsion EQ, and a lite touch of compression. The mix was 
done on Sonic Foundry Vegas 4.0 (Audio / Video production) software. 
In order to achive the 8 second long sample length, I did have to 
loop all the violin notes (hey, nobody performing a solo piece wants 
to hold a note for 8 seconds he he), but because there are three 
violins in the mix (with all different sample lengths) the loops 
never occoured right at the same time, thus giving the illusion that 
there is no loop. Another cool thing with the software I was using, 
I was able to do "fade looping" witch helped me to easily avoid the 
unwanted click / pop noise you get from standard looping. After the 
mix I ended up with 33 notes, missing only the g3, and d#5 keys 
witch gave me enough to work with.  For those missing notes, I just 
used the notes next to them. I am still searching for those notes.
   As far as the sampler, I used Virtual sampler 2.7 (on my PC) with 
a midi controller to play the sounds. Vsampler is the greatest toy 
that I have found for myself so far this year.  It gave me more of 
an excuse to collect (and create) as many Mellotron samples as 
possible!  I think I'm up to something like 4 Gigs (4,000 MB) of 
Mellotron samples now, including alot of sounds from the MKII.

Cheers.     -Brady