If you can’t afford to purchase the real thing, GMedia’s M-Tron is a decent, easy to use substitute for a Mellotron. There are quite a few sample sets and VSTi’s on the market now, but M-Tron is probably the most user friendly; whether used as a VSTi or as a standalone.
I’ve owned the M-Tron since it first came out and have purchased the additional tape sets as they became available. Now all are available in one package for less than the price I paid for just the VSTi.
GUI: The interface nicely mimics an M400 Mellotron. There are volume, tone and pitch knobs. The selector switch, instead of selecting one of three available sounds from a tape frame, opens a list of all available sounds. Unlike a real M400, you cannot mix adjacent tracks. The only thing I think is useless is the envelope option, which doesn’t exist on a real Tron. Maybe Gmedia included it to overcome the bad starts on several of the samples.
Sound: Judging from the size of the sample sets, I would guess that the sample rate is 44.1k at 16 bits. For 35 fully sampled notes (6 to 8 seconds each), this should come to about 20 megabytes, which the M-Tron sample sets seem to be. There are more than 100 sounds, but several are redundant and vary in quality. For example, there are several versions of the infamous MkII 3 Violins of varying sound quality. There are also some sound effect sets from an SFX tape set, and rhythms and fills from a MkII tape set. In addition to the Mellotron samples, there are some decent Chamberlin samples and some really cheezy Birotron samples (although this may be due to the fact that the Birotron was a bad concept in the first place). Still, the M-Tron has the greatest variety of sounds of any other sample set on the market.
Features: Basically, the feature set is the same as a real M400; sparse, but complete in and of itself.
Docs: The M-Tron is so simple that the documentation is more than adequate. If you can’t figure out how to use it without any documentation whatsoever, a 2 inch thick manual isn’t going to do you any good.
Presets: Lots of them; more sounds than the infamous MkI and MkII.
Support: The one or two times I wrote to GMedia, I got no response, so I’d say, not very good.
VFM: It’s a bargain compared to the other sample sets on the market.
Stability: Very stable.
Besides the M-Tron, I also own the Pinder sample set which is more expensive and sparser in sound variety (but of higher sound quality for the most part), the CrimeSounds sample set (good sound quality and downloadable from the MI7 website as individual notes or sets) and samples of my own Trons (superior in sound quality to the above sample sets, but not a lot of variety). All in all, the M-Tron will give you the most bang for your buck (or euro or ruble or renminbi, or whatever you use).
