Mellotron Archives Collections Akai

I've been playing music for about 40 years, although most of them have been for personal enjoyment. My main instrument has been bass guitar and some guitar. As a former professional, I played rock and roll, Motown, classical, standards, jazz, Latin jazz, "world music" before the term existed, and several other styles.

I've been using the Mellotron Archives samples, as well as the M-Tron VST plugin, other samples I've purchased from Tron owners, and samples from my own M400. I use an Alesis QS7.1 as the midi keyboard serial-ported into a Dell XPS desktop computer running at 3.2gh, 2gb of RAM, 2 80gb hard drives, an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card driving an Onkyo 100w amplifier pushing a pair of JBL 4311 studio monitors. The software is Cubase SX3/Halion.

The samples are pretty good. They are better than the samples I've purchased from other Tron owners. They are about on a par with the best M-Tron samples, but you get more sounds for your money with the M-Tron, even though some of the sounds are redundant. They are not as good as the samples from my own Tron. The main problem with the MA samples is that the Tron tapes are only sampled at 22,050 instead of 44,100, so the sound is a little thin. The disk is certainly overpriced for the small number of instruments available, but it does include some decent Chamberlin samples.

I have been playing guitar for 12 years and have been an enginere for about 8 years. I play in a sixtys mod band and when I am doing studio work I do all types of music. I use the mellotron samples with an akai 3000 sampler with an external disk drive, and use a korg keyboard as a controller. I Have been using the samples in my recording studio for about two months. I usually put the outputs of the sampler strait into the mixing board, then listen threw a pair of tannoy moniters.

I think these samples were definatly worth the money. I had been downloading mellotron samples off of the internet with mixed results, then I took a leap of faith and got this official mellotron sample disk ,put togather by Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues.
Most of the sounds are useable, There are a few like the guitar sample that I don't think I will ever use. The samples were made strait off the outputs of restored mellotrons and chamberlins. The mellotron samples are real haunting and shakey with all the improfections of the original insternment, but I prefer the chamberlin samples. The strings and chello samples sound real, especially when you layer parts. All in all If you want mellotron samples these are for you.