IK Multimedia SampleTron 2, Virtual Instrument With Over 8GB Of Vintage Tape Sounds

IK Multimedia SampleTron 2, a deep-sampled virtual Mellotron/Chamberlin instrument & full-featured sound design tool for custom tape-infused sounds.

IK Multimedia from Italy was involved in the sampling landscape at an early stage. With SampleTank the flagship, Sonik Synth 2, and others. Many of these libraries have since been modernized with new sample content, features, interfaces & more.

A virtual instrument has waited a long time for a new version. With SampleTron 2, IK Multimedia is showing the long-awaited successor to the SampleTron plugins from 2008.

IK Multimedia SampleTron 2

SampleTron 2 combines the best-known engine of SampleTank 4 with IK’s own tape modeling technology. These together allow the user to recreate the distinctive, ultra-vibey sounds of tape-based samplers from the ’60s and ’70s. It ships with a huge collection with over 400 “tracks” sampled from Mellotrons, Chamberlins as well as other vintage digital pearls like the Mattel Optigan, Vako Orchestron, and more.

These are built into 10 different virtual instruments. Each can load up to 3 tracks/sounds and offers the known parameters of the originals as well as new ones.

Tron Engine

A big improvement to the first SampleTron version is the ability to load own samples into the engine. Here you have functions like wow, noise, bias, erosion… to the vintage Tron character to your sounds. On a second panel, you have also controls for fine-tuning, different filters, envelopes, and so on. Thus, you can create more modern Tron-like sounds with the same vibe as the originals.

As in SampleTank 4 and Syntronik, the plugin includes a rack with vintage-modeled effects including a channel strip, tape echo, chorus, ensemble, rotary, and a new vintage plate reverb. The latter comes from the new Amplitube 5 and Mixbox plugins.

Now SampleTron has finally received a solid update with version 2 as well. As a former user of the SampleTron 1, I’m curious how it sounds. The first already sounded great. From the first videos, it can already convince me. You have to take a closer look at whether the library can keep up with the excellent Gforce Software M-Tron Pro. Either way, it’s nice to see the successor with new features, sample import functionality & more.