Another factor is that some users paid the manufactures to record
tapes of their own sounds - so the BBC had spot sound effects, other
players had MiniMoog sounds or electric guitars, oboe, trumpet etc.
They would all suffer / benefit from the instabilities - and you'd
be able to hear it was a mellotron playing - but they still wouldn't
be the 'standard' tones that we've all become used to from countless
records.

No, sometimes the instabilty was not 'consistant'. On earlier
models, the motor would lose the will if you played loads of notes
at once... so the bigger the chord, the flatter the pitch. Not sure
how you would emulate this on the P2K / X-Lead... but maybe some
instabilities are less desirable than others. And yes, the tapes
would stretch over time... or under hot stage lighting.

All you want, really, is enough variation to make it
sound 'organic' - and, to reiterate, it's a random variation, not a
cyclic one - it's not vibrato. And as for initial pitch variation -
you just want to hear a very slightly different note every time you
play the same key. You might also want to do exactly the same for
the filter, so as to have instabilities of tone too.

Listen to the phased lead mellotron on Tangerine Dream's 'Phaedra' -
starting 3:37 in - to hear what i mean. [it almost sounds to me like
it's playing in Just Intonation!]


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The filter isn't to be used as a filter in this example (ie opening
in some kind of wowwwing fashion), just as a tone control to dull
the sound - so no envelope needed. A Smooth filter with frequency
at, say, 160 is enough to dull the waveforms - though the BlisBatz
is quite good at making the sort of tape-head harshness that a
Mellotron can sometimes have (to my ear). Also there is no release
on a Mellotron - the sound stops dead when you take a finger off the
key (and after eight seconds anyway if you hold the key down - coz
you run out of tape!). You might also want to put a small delay in
to the program to trick the fingers into thinking they are playing a
stiff mechanical keyboard.


With nothing less sad to do with my Christmas, and four of the P2K
ROMs in front of me, I've been playing with to see what compares
side by side with the Vintage ROM. I can get very close with the
Composer ROM... not least because it contains the same Tron Strings
as the Vintage ROM, and the 'real' flute, brass and voices function
very well instead of the Tron versions.

However, with the X Rom, there isn't a direct 'real' equivalent,
so...

0092 vox: Wave 2 seems closest for voices,
0051 syn: Synth 12 or 0496 pad: Mood Strings for strings.
0004 wav: Triangle is perhaps closest to a flute; add some white
noise in for that one, as the Mellotron Flute is quite breathy and
has a 'chiff' on it [in other words, do what you'd do to make a
realistic flute on a synth, then make it duller and more out of
tune!]


I should also add that it's not really necessary to use the Lag for
the random LFO - if you're using just enough of the stepped waveform
to be noticeable, the ear will think it's constantly varying anyway.
Also, if the LFO is free-running you might get away without applying
Key Random to Pitch... all depends on how much you want to mess
around with the menus.


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Incidentally, the old Vintage Keys and Classic Keys appear to have
different Mellotron samples to the P2K based ROMs - the VK and CK,
to my ear, have the single-manual M400 tapes and the Vintage Rom is
much more like the older Mk II. [In Edgar Froese terms... the VK
would be 'Epsilon in Malaysian Pale', and the Vintage Pro would
be 'Atem'] The older modules also allow you to do the 'stopping'
effect. You might want to eBay one of these old things - i love mine.