Can an iPhone Mellotron replace a real Mellotron?

That’s what Omenie Software, makes of the iPhone Ellatron software, set out to demo with their take on David Bowie’s Space Oddity:

During Summer 2009 the 40th anniversary edition of Space Oddity was released, along with 8 original stems to support remixing. How could we possibly avoid that remix challenge?!

So, challenge accepted – here is one of the most influential Mellotron songs of all time – Rick Wakeman, no less – with his Wakemanness artfully removed by muting the track in Logic. And the Rolf Harrisisms of the Stylophone removed as well, but that was trickier as the Stylophone and lead guitar share a track. Mellotron and Stylophone were replaced by Ellatron’s ‘Mellostring’ and ‘Stellavibe’ respectively, to give authentic Mellotron string and vibrato stylophone sounds.

Ellatron sits beautifully in the mix (even though the level is artificially lifted for emphasis), and the result is totally convincing, with no post-processing at all on the Ellatron tracks. There’s no question Ellatron is an excellent performance instrument, particularly the new (not quite released!) Ellatron version 1.5 with 12 chord buttons – 16 songs, each with 12 chords allows a band to apply rich Tron sounds to a whole set, without having any musical talent whatsoever – if you can read a chord book you can program a whole set into Ellatron!