This project aims to provide a simple mellotron emulator to be played using a keyboard MIDI controller. mellotron.ck can use any arbitrary sample in .wav format as its voice.
Samples need to be stored in a directory named "samples", which should live in the same directory that mellotron.ck is being run from.
mellotron.ck is intended to be used on a Linux system with JACK running. This document assumes you aready have JACK and ChucK installed and know something about using them. mellotron.ck should probably also work on Windows or OS X, but configuring the MIDI device, etc. will work a little differently, but if you're feeling ambitious you can probably figure out how to make it work.
Telling mellotron.ck which MIDI device to take input from requires a little bit of work on the part of the user:
You should run chuck --probe to output a list of available MIDI devices, and determine the integer ID of the device you want to use.
| mellotron.ck
| samples/
|--- flute.wav
|--- oboe.wav
invoking mellotron.ck requires at least two command line arguments - the filename of the sample to be loaded, and the integer ID number of the MIDI device to be used.
Optionally, as a third argument, the user can provide an integer to change the 'offset' - a higher integer results in lower pitch, and a lower integer results in a higher pitch. This could possibly come in handy if you're using a MIDI controller with no octave switching.
a sample invocation:
chuck mellotron.ck:flute.wav:1
once the program is running, you may jam ;)