Real Music Media has released a collection of free Mellotron samples.

These samples were taken from a 30 year old Mellotron M400S, serial #500 a few years ago.

The Tron’s condition was decent. The heads were cleaned and the azimuth was aligned by Streetly Electronics in England (the original maker of this Tron) just prior to sampling. The capstan was clean, but the pinch rollers were a little dry.

The cabinet was out of square. The tapes and frame were brand new.

The 3 Violins sound is the harsher sounding MkII violins and not the M400 violins, which are really the MkII violins with the top end rolled off. The samples were recorded “hot” with the tone control fully clockwise. This is NOT how M400’s are normally played. The tone control is generally set from about 1/8 to 1/3 clockwise.

You will probably want to cut the top end drastically due to the brightness of the samples. Each set of samples is about 20 megabytes.

These samples have NOT been butchered by looping them. They are approximately 7 seconds in length and retain both the initial attack, and in many cases, the bad endings.