Friday 21 May 2010

Mellotronics M3000 ... putting the 'M' into Ellatron

When we launched Ellatron we had lots of very positive feedback. That's because you people out there are lovely.

The only negative comments were about the 'Mellotron purity' of Ellatron - its use of note sharing and looping made it impure in the eyes of the faithful. Our roadmap for Ellatron - sequencing, synths, onboard effects - is clearly pushing Ellatron further away from Mellotron purity. We totally love Ellatron, and the long-awaited version 2.0 will be amazing. But we also love Mellotrons, and we wanted to make as pure a recreation of the classic Tron as possible.

So we did the only sensible thing - we called up the guys that make the real thing, and partnered with them.

And here is the wide world's first glimpse at the Mellotronics M3000 HD. Powered by Ellatron and stuffed with genuine Mellotronics, this is initially an iPad-exclusive baby brother to Streetly's amazing M4000 tape-replay instrument, with iPhone version to follow. Streetly have for the first time made their entire tape vault available under license, and the M3000 is stuffed with voices derived from the Mellotronics tape library - *EXACTLY* the same tapes that appear on all those Beatles, Genesis, King Crimson and Zombies records.

All 35 notes of each voice are sampled - this is a *BIG* application, and it sounds beautiful. To make it even more beautiful we've integrated a gorgeous, lush and highly controllable reverb engine. The Church organ never sounded bigger ...

Four voices can be resident in memory at one time, allowing the classic A/B/C switch to be used to instantly switch between voices. Even better, the A/B/C switch is in fact a continuous controller to support an infinite* variety of blended tones. All the while, a 4th voice can be used with the now-standard Ellatron chord pads.

No bells. No whistles. Just 120 MBytes of pure, musical, Mellotronic joy.

*Not quite infinite. Your mileage may vary.


5 comments:

  1. Great news! Shared it at iPad Music http://www.facebook.com/iPadMusic

    ReplyDelete
  2. Okay folks, 2 questions:
    1) when is the release date?
    2) is it a more professional version of the Ellatron HD app?

    Thanks,

    AW
    alister@ajwebb.com
    www.metronomes.com.au
    Also on Facebook: Metronomes

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alister - it's a 'more Mellotron' version of Ellatron HD. Unlike Ellatron and Ellatron HD all the voices are from the genuine Mellotronics production tapes - archival copies of the original Mellotron tapes from the 1960s - so all the sounds are absolutely authentic. The sound engine has been reworked so we can sample all 35 notes of the Mellotron tape set, so there's no note sharing, and it has 13 voices in total with all the classics - Mark II flutes, Mark II violins, String Section, Eight Choir, Female Choir, Boys Choir. It sounds absolutely amazing.

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  4. And the plan is for it to be in the store June 10th - it's passed approval and is set to ship that date, but we may squeeze in a minor change to bring in a feature it really needs and that came up in beta testing as 'must-have', which could push the date out another day or 2.

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  5. Does development of M3000 for iPad continue? Just curious

    ReplyDelete