25 slices of “Mk II Vintage Violins” ranging from C2 to C4 created by yours truly. In the spirit of the Mellotron (and what a spirit it is) I decided to opt for the non-looped versions of those strings taken from my Gforce Mtron Pro software–which happens to be the first bit of software I ever bought to use with a DAW and remains a staple in a lot of my productions. Go figure–I’m a sucker for that 60s sound.
If it isn’t obvious, to make use of this you’ll want to enable slice mode in your playback setup, then put the OT into slice mode in your play setup (is that what it’s called?) i.e. func+down arrow until you get to “slice mode”.
The one glaring problem with this, to me, is that step 13 becomes C3, rather than having step 1 of the next page being C3. I imagine I can fix this by “adding slices of silence” in Octachainer, but also now that I think about it, being able to access more than an octave on a single page is pretty nice, and I wrote a melody that spans an octave, so who knows. I suppose it’s personal preference.
For those curious, my process was actually fairly tedious and I would like to hear any opinions on a more streamlined way of approaching this:
- Open up Mtron Pro in my DAW: Studio One Pro.
- Play a C note for as long as the software will allow.
- Turn off snap, duplicate, press the up arrow to transpose it to C#, repeat 23 more times.
- Right click > Audio Event > Explode pitches to tracks.
- Song > Export as Stems (highlighting all the midi tracks and selecting “bounce” and “transform to rendered audio” didn’t seem to work)
- Open up a new project, import the stems.
6.5. The stems are in alphabetical order, which is extremely annoying and now I must reorganize them. If I do this again in the future, I’ll be sure to rename each file BEFORE exporting stems to “1, 2, 3” etc. - Now I have a bunch of files with a lot of empty space at the beginning. Tab to transient, alt+x to slice at marker, repeat 24 more times, delete all the empty space and drag every file to the beginning, making them as short as possible (all about eight seconds).
- Export stems again.
- Open the stems in Octachainer.
- Finish it there, tell it to have 2ms fade in and fade out, drag and drop to OT.
So I still hear clicking on some of the samples. Should I have a longer fade in/fade out? Maybe 5 ms? You can also just adjust the attack envelope. I’m open to any feedback to get this improved and sounding good.
It occurred to me immediately after firing up the strings that–oh, yes, that’s right, the OT isn’t polyphonic. So juicy, mellotron string chords aren’t there at the tip of my fingers like I thought. In fact, I’d love to hear your guys’ workarounds for this sort of stuff. Obviously you can load up the same sample on multiple tracks, record individual notes and get some chords that way. Ah well.
Lastly, is there a way to use your MIDI keyboard to play the slices on your OT or is there not? I’d like to know.
I hope this works for you guys. If not, I’ll need a suggestion for what will. Not exactly sure how best to upload this stuff.