Digital Keyboard
Have you ever longed for the sound and style of a
Mellotron without the impracticality, unreliability and team of men
required to move it? If so, you need yearn no more — thanks to the
Memotron...
The dream of a digital Mellotron has existed since the birth of
digital sampling, and the promise of Mellotron chips for the 360
Systems Digital Keyboard had me on tenterhooks for years in the
mid-1980s. Since then, there have been myriad PCM-based emulations and
sample collections, including my own MkII library. I was therefore
intrigued when the Memotron was announced, and have watched its progress
since its first appearance at the NAMM show in January 2006.
Introducing The Memotron
It’s
a beautiful instrument modelled on the classic, white Mellotron 400,
and even players who don’t understand the appeal of the original can’t
fail to be moved by its deep lacquer, the quality of the hardware, and
the obvious care lavished on its construction and appearance.
Starting
at the back, there are stereo outputs, a headphone output, an input
for the optional volume (swell) pedal, and MIDI In/Out/Thru sockets. The
only control on the rear panel is a contrast knob for the small LCD on
the control panel.
Like the 400, the Memotron’s
control panel has knobs for volume, tone (in this case, a passive
12dB/oct low-pass filter), pitch and sound selection, the last of which
allows you to move seamlessly between the sounds loaded into its A, B
and C slots. So if, for example, you want to combine a choir and a
cathedral organ, you load the two sounds into adjacent slots (say, A
and B) and then turn the selector to somewhere between the A and B
positions to obtain the desired mix.
There are
just three additional controls. The first of these is a half-speed
switch. Inspired by an option installed on some original Mellotrons,
this emulates the effect that you obtain by halving the speed of the
tape transport. This not only has the effect of dropping the pitch by an
octave, but also constrains the bandwidth, for the ominous, rumbling,
God-on-a-bad-day sounds beloved of Mellotronists. The second and third
controls are the data controller/selector and the Escape button, which
work in conjunction with the screen to deliver the Memotron’s additional
functions: independent volume, attack, release and pan for each of the
three slots, plus effects and the MIDI setup for the instrument as a
whole.
Modus Operandi
The
front-panel controls are very much like those of a Mellotron 400 —
except for the LCD screen, Data knob and Escape button, of course.
After switching on, you have to load the sounds that
you want to play into memory, and this takes around 15 seconds per slot.
You can then tailor these using the edit parameters. Panning two sounds
hard right and hard left allows you to direct them down separate
outputs, which is useful. The release setting is also interesting. If
you release a key before eight seconds are up, the sound releases in
the typical ‘synth’ fashion. However, if the keys are still depressed
when eight seconds is reached, or the release is still tailing off, the
sound stops dead, as it should.
If you wish to
add effects, there are 15 algorithms available, including reverbs,
delays, chorus, flanging and a rotary speaker effect. Unfortunately,
control is almost non-existent: you can select the algorithm wanted, and
determine the ‘send’ amount. Although I can see the reverbs and delays
being used on stage, I can’t imagine that anybody would use the
in-built effects in the studio.
The sounds
themselves are provided on a library of (currently) five CDs (see the
‘Tape Sets’ box). You can load these via the discreet slot in the front
of the Memotron but, much more conveniently, you can also store the
whole library (with room to spare) on compact flash RAM cards, for which
there’s a slot on the rear panel. Manikin kindly supplied me with a
4GB card onto which everything was already loaded and, once this was
inserted, the whole library of Memotron sounds was available without me
having to mess around.
Despite this simplicity,
it’s a complete pain in the arse having to load the sounds you want and
then set up the voicing parameters and effects every time you switch
the Memotron on. Fortunately, this problem will vanish when the current
v1.2 operating system is superseded by v1.3, hopefully by the time you
read this. The new version introduces the concept of Frames, which are
complete instrument setups that include all the information regarding
which sounds are loaded, plus all the voicing, MIDI and effects
parameters you have programmed. If you have the correct flash card or CD
inserted, the Frame will then tell the Memotron which samples to load,
and configure everything in a single operation. This will be a massive
step forward in speed and usability. What’s more, a Frame will occupy
just a few kilobytes (the sample data is not included in the Frame) so,
with a suitable RAM card, you’ll be able to store thousands of setups.
The Sounds
The Memotron’s ports are all labelled right-way-up and upside-down, which is handy if you’re looking over the top.
So, what of the sounds? I asked Klaus Hoffmann, the
man behind them, to reveal the whole story. He told me: “I started
getting involved with the Mellotron when I purchased my first one in
1974. I then started searching for additional tape frames and, in the
late 1970s, I found 10 still in their boxes at Macari’s Music in
London. In 1981, I met Norman Bradley [of Streetly Electronics,
manufacturers of the original Mellotrons] and his wife, along with the
young John Bradley, at the Frankfurt MusikMesse. Because I speak
English and German, and because I was such an enthusiast, they asked me
if I would assist them at the following year’s Messe, which I did,
learning even more about Mellotrons.
“The
Mellotron lost its magic in the 1980s, and people were selling them —
often in poor condition — for peanuts. I bought all that I could and
restored them to the beautiful machines that they had once been. Soon I
owned six M400s and had a collection of about 140 tape frames,
including rare ones like Patrick Moraz’s stage tapes for Yes, as well as
some of Tangerine Dream’s custom tapes. However, having a family to
feed, I later sold them. In the 1990s, there was a resurgence of
interest in Mellotrons, so I started to help people to buy refurbished
M300s, M400s and MkIIs from Streetly Electronics, who brought the
instruments to my house and offered me the chance to record them
digitally. I also undertook repair jobs for owners, many of whom gave
me permission to record their rare — and sometimes custom — tapes. My
library of Mellotron sounds grew, and now, with each set comprising the
full duration of all 35 notes recorded in CD quality, I have more than
28 hours of recordings. It’s this library that forms the basis of the
Memotron.”
Klaus also provided sounds for the
G-Force M-Tron Pro, so there have been rumours that the Memotron is
nothing more than a plug-in wearing sexy clothes. I have M-Tron Pro on
the Mac on which I’m writing this, so I loaded it and chose two sounds
that are present within both libraries: MkII Brass. It was immediately
apparent that they are not the same. This is not merely different
encoding or different D/A stages; some of the characteristic flaws
(bumps and grinds that naturally occur when playing and recording a
Mellotron) that are present within the Memotron’s samples are not
present on M-Tron Pro’s, and vice versa. I tried another, the Cello.
Again, the two were different in ways that could not be attributed to
changes in EQ or other processing of the same recordings.
I
queried this with Hoffman, and he explained that about 75 percent of
the M-Tron Pro sounds are his, but confirmed that they are based upon
different recordings from those he used for the Memotron. I also
checked with the chaps at G-Force Software about the supposed
cross-compatibility of the two libraries. They told me that the Memotron
is compatible with the CPT sound file format used on the CD-ROMs for
the original M-Tron. The M-Tron Pro sounds are stored in the newer CPT2
format, and are not compatible with the Memotron.
So
what of the sounds themselves? These are not Hoffman’s “CD quality”
recordings; they have been down-sampled to a sample rate of 32kHz, and
an audio bandwidth of, therefore, around 14kHz. But lest you think that
this is a problem, it’s not. The useful bandwidth of original
Mellotrons (especially in their earliest incarnations) was lower than
this, so only tape hiss would have existed above this range.
Secondly,
let’s be clear that the Memotron does not use unadulterated Mellotron
samples. Far from being a criticism, I think that this can be a good
thing, and even the chaps at Streetly Electronics cleaned up their
library before assembling the tapes for the Mellotron M4000. Wisely,
though, Hoffman has kept processing to a minimum, avoiding
normalisation, and using de-noising only when, as he puts it, “the
background noise was unbearable by today’s standards”. He also removed
some of the worst clicks and pops, and corrected some known tuning
errors so that different sounds could be blended together. (This was
impossible with certain combinations on early Mellotrons.) Obsessives
may complain that the Memotron is not authentic, but I’m not too
concerned by that. The Memotron is a modern instrument, and I think
that it represents an appropriate compromise between the charm and
authenticity that nostalgic players demand, and the sound quality that
modern listeners demand.
Playing The Memotron
So
does the Memotron feel like a Mellotron? No, it doesn’t. Let’s start
with the obvious; the Memotron weighs around 12kg, so one person can
carry it easily, and it doesn’t need to have a fan-heater shoved in the
back to minimise condensation and ensure that it works on cold stages.
What’s more, it doesn’t have keys that feel like old girders, nor tapes
that tangle when the roadies load it into the van on its side, and the
chances are that it will never need servicing. In other words, the
Memotron is practical.
What’s more, while the
Memotron’s A/B/C architecture is, in principle, identical to that of the
M4000 (ie. you have immediate access to three sounds, but with a
larger library in the background), the Memotron has the huge advantage
of allowing you to mix between any three sounds at any time, whereas the
real Mellotron only allows you to select between the three that lie on
adjacent tracks on the tapes.
With regard to the
playing experience, an original Mellotron has a hugely distinctive
character, largely as a consequence of its keyboard and the technique
that is needed to play it. But poorly serviced Mellotrons are also
liable to respond badly, with artifacts such as wow, flutter or even
drop-outs, so what people perceive as character today are faults that we
oldies were desperate to remedy in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s no
coincidence that Keith Emerson’s Mellotron ended up in an orchestra pit,
Rick Wakeman’s was doused in petrol and immolated, and Tony Banks’ was
ignominiously replaced by a Roland VP330.
In
contrast, the Memotron plays beautifully. Like its inspiration, it’s
fully polyphonic, and it feels like I always imagined a perfectly
adjusted Mellotron would, with just the right degree of weight, a
slight thunk at the bottom of its travel, but with a slight spongy
feeling when depressed that is appropriate for the instrument. Even the
Mellotron’s instantly recognisable pitch-bends are perfectly recreated,
with a smooth, analogue feel. Unfortunately, Manikin have not gone the
extra mile and imitated the slight pressure-sensitivity of the original
(you could slow the tapes a tad by pressing hard on the capstans, thus
making manual vibrato possible), nor does it glitch when you play notes
too quickly, nor does the pitch droop when you play a whole fistful of
notes simultaneously. Are these omissions faults? To be honest, I would
like to see the pressure-sensitivity restored, but otherwise the answer
has to be ‘no’. While faults may be perceived as character in the
bedroom or a museum, they are simply faults in the studio or on stage,
and their absence makes the Memotron a much more reassuring instrument
to play in any environment.
What’s more, the
construction quality of the Memotron shines through when you start to
use it in earnest. Unlike Keith’s Mellotron, I suspect that the
Memotron might have survived its journey into the pit and — battered and
bruised — been ready for the following night’s gig. Think of it like
this... a 1915 Model T pickup truck might be a lovely artifact to own,
but if your job entails driving a few hundred miles a week, you’re
more likely to buy an Audi.
Conclusions
Perhaps
because of misty-eyed nostalgia, or perhaps because they have never
owned Mellotrons, a number of writers on synth forums have claimed that
the Memotron sounds lifeless when compared to the original, and that it
is nothing more than a plug-in wrapped up in a controller keyboard.
This lacks insight; there’s no way that a controller, a PC and a
plug-in will feel like the Memotron, which screams ‘play me’ at the top
of its voice, although M-Tron Pro is wonderfully cost-effective. What’s
more, the original Mellotron’s sharp yet mournful sound still defies
perfect recreation via sampling technology, so there’s always going to
be a place for the original instruments, as well as the new M4000s,
which Streetly can’t build quickly enough to fulfil orders. Nonetheless,
the Memotron comes close to the original, both in terms of sound and
performance, and in the real world it is a very practical alternative
to the real thing. While players will notice the differences, I very
much doubt that listeners will and, if there’s one available, I won’t
hesitate to take it on stage when I next need to use a Mellotron
‘live’
No comments:
Post a Comment