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Looper's Delight
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>>I'm really enjoying the way the analog signal
loss/degradation/noise starts to make the "real deal"
instruments sound very mellotronish, especially when
juxtaposed with the crisper sound of the
direct-to-digital instruments.[snip]Is
anyone else out there being intentionally
anachronistic with their equipment, either using new
tech to simulate the sound of old stuff or getting
modern tones out of vintage gear?<<
simulating mellotron, did you say? :-)
I have a real 400, which we've stopped gigging for a number of practical reasons. but what I started doing even before we got the thing in 1991 was "shogging" my samples by laying them off to 1/4" tape, sometimes at deliberately-altered fidelity (i.e. slow tape, distorted, wowing...) before resampling them. this gave all my samples a slightly more organic feel, a bit more like the 'tron.
what I do now is augment this with a lot of complex but subtle modulation routing;
my weapon of choice for sample playback is the emu proteus module, though I prepare the samples in one of their big samplers & then burn them onto 32Mb flash sticks. the samples include but are not limited to instruments from my mellotron tape collection (nine frames of three instruments each). I add small amounts of two different random lfo's to the pitch, amplitude & filter, & use velocity to control the sample start-point, simulating an incomplete rewind in the real 'tron. I also route a tiny amount of aftertouch to the pitch, so the instrument goes a bit flat if you press harder.....
the proteus allows custom tuning scales to be built, so I can interfere with the intonation/temperament of the instruments aswell.
using a "vanilla" patch with these routings set up, & the envelopes set to a hard gate, inserting pretty much any sample produces the equivalent of a "mellotron" version of that sound.
this is not to demean the playback fidelity of a properly aligned mellotron, but these effects are apparent to some degree in any mechanical replay device.
in fact, using the same techniques on regular synth waveforms goes a long way to improving the rompler's attempt at analogue synth sounds, especially if you sample the waveforms from a real synth instead of building it from waveforms that come with the rompler. I especially like the effect of offsetting the scaling of one "oscillator" (in fact, one layer of the rompler patch) to imitate the difference in tuning of two oscillators in a typical moog (or w.h.y.) as one works up & down the keyboard. again, messing with the sample start-point is beneficial here....
I could write about this all day....
duncan/radio massacre international.
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