Recording - June 2012 - 44

RECORDING'S

SHOWCASE OF SOUNDS
will be available to play the open first and second strings after each of the main melody’s notes are articulated high on the fret board... how authentic is that! Vibrato samples can be activated either by key switch or with the mod wheel—use the latter method if you want to add vibrato to a note after it’s been struck. The vibrato is subtle and quite effective. Two velocity levels of muted notes, and natural and artificial harmonics are included, and this feature adds yet another subtle degree of realism to the library. There’s more to be said about Nylon Guitar, and we haven’t even got around to the Strum option, which I hope we can cover separately, but we’re running out of space. As you can see, I’m a big fan of this library, but there is one flaw that I hope can be corrected in a later version, and that’s pitch. Establishing perfect octaves, for example, on

a fretted instrument is hard for a builder to achieve, and unfortunately Nylon Guitar is slightly pitchy throughout its range. The slight beating that can be heard between the D (5th string, 5th fret) and its upper octave (2nd string, third fret) is absent when the first of this pair is played on the open D string. Offending notes could be helped by the judicious use of pitch correction software. As is, though, this slight problem has no effect on my recommendation. Very few instruments demand attention the way that Nylon Guitar does. It had me grabbing for the Villa-Lobos catalog, remembering those great Chet Atkins arrangements, and improvising in the styles that used to command my attention. If you’re in the market for a “classical” guitar and aren’t ready to plunk down $5000 for the real deal, I’d suggest you head up to Ilya’s website and listen to some of the demos that he’s posted.—Gary Eskow Price: $129 ($199 with Strum option) More from: Ilya Efimov, www.ilyaefimov.com

GForce ChamberTron, OptiTron, and The Streetly Tapes Vol.1 for M-Tron Pro
(or sometimes at all), like envelopes, splits and layers, a multimode filter with aftertouch control, tape reverse/halfspeed playback, and built-in effects... all of which could easily be hidden away if one wanted the original Tron experience. But the one place where M-Tron Pro users still had a wish list was in its sound set; while the original plug-in came loaded with dozens of Tron tape racks both famous and rare, there were other analog-playback instruments left untouched. GForce took a while to address this shortcoming, but when it did, it did with a vengeance. There are now three sound expansions for M-Tron Pro available from GForce, each unique in its own way and worthy of a quick review. All three libraries are downloadable by registered M-Tron Pro owners from the GForce website, with serial number authorization to get them up and running inside MTron Pro. They use the plug-in’s proprietary sound file format and can’t be loaded into other samplers, assuming you’d even want to give up all of the tailor-made sound tweaks the M-Tron Pro plug-in provides. ChamberTron Harry Chamberlin invented tape-playback keyboards in the 1950s, and the Mellotron was largely inspired by (some would say stolen from) his original and much less famous designs. Because he used different recordings and different playback technology (a wider tape head that reproduced more high end), his instruments have that characteristic tape-playback vibe but much more high-end clarity than comparable Mellotrons. The GForce ChamberTron collection has been taken from the baseline Chamberlin M1 model, the 600-pound four-manual M4 (of which only four were ever made), the Chamberlin 600, and the very rare Rhythmate 25 tape-based drum playback machine. There’s all kinds of cool stuff in this collection for the tape-keyboard aficionado; slurred guitar parts for expressive phrase building, harp arpeggios and rolls straight out of old film soundtracks, Spanish guitar, male and female solo voices (no choirs), and more. The strings (solo and grouped) have more vibrato than you might be used to in a Tron sound—compare, for example, the Chamberlin Violins 1 to the Tron’s MkII Violins—but this is a stylistic choice, and gives a nice breadth of available timbres. And there are a few fun extras as well, like a grand piano that’s brighter and drier than the Mellotron MkII offering, a hard-hitting Clavinet, and a small collection of what can only be described as the sounds of Trons gone wrong—notes slowing down, burps and blips of tape noise, and other familiar hiccups that will make anyone who’s ever used a real Tron cringe. If I had to target a preferred buyer for this collection, it would be the Tron user who either knows and wants a piece of the less famous but still worthwhile Chamberlin heritage, or the user who wants something different and perhaps higher-fidelity for his Tron without entirely giving up the tape keyboard experience. There are a lot of treasures to be found here either way. OptiTron The Optigan was sold by Mattel in the 1970s; it was intended to be a home organ for family use, with rhythms playable by left-hand buttons and leads playable on the keyboard. It used analog sound playback like the Mellotron and Chamberlin, but

The Mellotron, that famous but quirky keyboard that played back tape recordings of real instruments when its keys were pressed, has been given a new lease on life as a software instrument. Much of the Tron’s oldschool character is retained in the samples when they’re well-transferred, but a software plug-in isn’t subject to the mechanical quirks and breakages that plagued the original. The flutes from “Strawberry Fields Forever”, the strings from “Nights In White Satin”, and hundreds of other Tron sounds made famous in decades of hit records, are now easily accessible to anyone. GForce gave us the original MTron plugin, and its successor the M-Tron Pro was first reviewed in our December 2009 issue. MTron Pro improved on the original with all sorts of tricks a Mellotron couldn’t do easily
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RECORDING JUNE 2012

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Recording - June 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2012