MellowTronic - Dimension/DimPro Tutorial

Jezzus, Tom, that is good. I can see why you don't do the patches - how would a body learn to do it without programming.

nice touches and I always loved the mellotron.

@

A tutorial that speaks directly to my heart.

I've always loved the hauntingly melancholy (and sometimes downright spooky) sound of "the tron".

This is a "freakin' awesome" (in my best American-ese) tutorial Tom. You deserve heaps of praise for the time it took alone, not to mention the content.

Many thanks.

Thanks for the nice comments, all. I hope you found this useful. I build these for my own use, and then (much later) attempt to put them into an understandable format. The kinks are already ironed out, so it really doesn't take that long to 'publish'. [As an aside to Brandon: Back at 'cha. You're going to end up 'demoing' me right into an S6 uprade soon enough. I'm just waiting for the dust to settle on the annual ****fest.]

For those of you who have followed through on the patch tweak, I'd like to expand on what I hinted at in the RND Processes section. It's very easy to construct a phat variation on this Mellotron theme, although it stretches the boundaries of realism. Just take the patch as described, Copy Element 1, and Paste it into the other 3 free Elements. With the added overall gain, you might want to drop all the Mix volumes to 50% at this point. Then you start substituting base multisamples from the Load Multisamples dialog. Here's what I did:

E2 - ahh male choir.sfz (from the 21 - Vocals sub-folder) Transpose 1***
E3 - ahh male choir.sfz (from the 21 - Vocals sub-folder) Transpose 13***
E4 - wood flute.sfz (from the 22 - Ethnic and World Instruments subfolder) Transpose 0

*** I liked the doubled/octaved 'ahh male choir' better than a combination with the solo female ahh.sfz. By doing so, there is some historical basis as found in the original tape recordings, but also a little problem. You see, the 'guys' in this Multisample are a little ... *ahem* flat. So just transpose them up an extra semitone in the Multisample editor in both E2 and E3. I also enabled that crazy Pitch EG on the flute to scramble it up a bit.

Take a look at the fourth pic in the tutorial. Node#1 (at 47.6 ms.) in the Amp EG borders the per-segment velocity (orange) bar. In each new Amp EG, hold Ctrl and click on that node. That allows you to move that single point without disturbing any of the other nodes. Drag it to a different location in each Element's Amp EG. Now you can press "V" in each, and adjust the amount that velocity affects this segment in each Element. If you're out, say, 250 ms. or so, you can bring it down under the horizontal center line, and it'll work 'backwards'.

Now you can mix down the proportions of note onset timing in all four Elements with your keyboard velocity. Each note played will start with a different mix of strings, choir, and flutes. One more adjustment is necessary, and this is easy: Open up the MIDI Matrix. It's still just controlling Element 1. So in each slot in the Destination column, left-click on the entry four times with your mouse. It'll switch, for example, Sample Offset 1 to Sample Offset All, and on down the line. Now all of the random control prep will apply to your new Elements mixture.

The results? Simultaneous string, choir and flute Mellotron, now available in extra-wide sizes.