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[microsound] re: forget your laptop, go for the melloman..!



http://www.mysterycircuits.com/

Well it's more a blogworthy curiosity than something all that expressive (useful?) as an instrument.


The irony is prog god Rick Wakeman with an inventor partner tried and failed with a company building something very similar 30 years ago, of course he did it with 8 track cartridge players. (which unlike cassettes were designed to play tape loops, although not glitch free or acceptably stable for professional use imho).
http://www.geocities.jp/mellotronics/biro005.html


His and these guy's major flaw is much of the character of a decent instrumental sound comes with the attack portion of the sound. If you have just a looped sustain portion of the sound (like both these units) you get an organ like variant. That's not to say you can't use it as an undemanding organ sound, it's not like it's unusable for music, it just doesn't achieve anything more.

The original Mellotron (best known for the flute on "Strawberry Fields", Tangerine Dream and King Crimson) had it's own different flaws. You had a couple different sounds and a selector (depending on the model) if you wanted to load another tape set it took a while and will certainly stop any music flow for some time consuming work, forget about between songs at a concert. The other limitation was the sounds were 7 seconds long with no loop. There would be something like a second and change before you could play the same not again. So if you wanted to hold a chord for 8 seconds you needed to adapt your music or playing style in a substantial way. But the point is all those special characteristics of the sound got played back, the chiff on the flute, the bow on the string, the unstable first part of a vocal etc.

Oh, and a small german company have a stand alone digital sample based Mellotron replacement, something that you for all intents duplicate with a plugin. I guess for a prog or Berlin School live act it has some advantages.

I'm sure the consensus why people are drawn to the Mellotron is, besides nostalgia, that a real one is imperfect and slightly unpredictable. I'm sure some comes across with this new variation (and not with the sample based recreations without additional coding they haven't done so far). Then again the Optigan, which is flawed in a bunch of different ways sounds weirder. It uses waveforms inked onto clear optical disk. Never used one, though I've experimented in with optical waveform readers during shows.

anyway here goes our take 1970s laptops
http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2006/02/friday-caption-competition.html


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