MDynamicsMB

On my multi-year learning and playing journey as a hobbyist in the world of music, I came across Melda Production plugins by coincidence some months back – don’t remember exactly how. I remember that I first started using the Melda free VST’s, and that I found that they turned good enough that I felt comfortable to “go Pro” by donate a few Euro’s for using them. I later worked some with MDynamics and the experience was likewise positive.

The path further on to MMultiBandDynamics is twofold. First of all I’ve been ramping up on my theory by reading “Mixing Audio – Concept, Practices and Tools”, by Roey Izhaki. Maybe, a little dry reading but nevertheless interesting, educational and highly recommendable. Secondly, I’d been working on a track and had arrived to the point where I wanted to add some vocal to it. And so I did. To be honest the vocals did not turn out too good – at least not in it’s raw form. Partly because my singing abilities are… well limited. I was using a good condenser mic so I could not blame the hardware. So what could I do (except taking some song lessons)?

Theory was telling me that what I need besides maybe draining the vocals in reverb, distortion etc. was to suppress the lower freq range to make the vocals crisper and less muddy. Also I needed an expander to: a) remove some of the spill-over noise that was picked up from the headphones I was wearing when recording the vocal track (these are btw open head phones and I guess I will need to get some closed ones for vocal recording in the future) and b) raise the gain level of the good part of the vocal recording – i.e. get some more dynamics. Then I would need a compressor to work from the top to reach a better balance throughout across recording.

As you might have guessed, it turned out that MMultiBandDynamics was the surgeon’s knife I was looking for to do all this!

GUI:
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The GUI is intuitive and easy to use. The ability to draw the expander/compressor function makes it rather easy to control both.
(BTW: there is only one set of Release and Attack so if different values for Expansion and Compression is needed, the way to do this is by putting two MMultiBandDynamics up after each other. I would probably start with the Expander config of MMultiBandDynamics and then feed that signal on to a Compressor of MMultiBandDynamics).

Sound:
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The sound feels clean and transparent to my ear and the control of what I’m trying to accomplish is very good. Detailed control can be managed by using the zoom on the Processing Shape.

Docs:
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No too much documentation, but the GUI is so intuitive that what I think is really needed is to understand the theory of using a Multi Band Dynamics unit (see book mentioned above) rather than a more detailed documentation of the plugin.

Features:
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I’m not aware of a similar plug-in with a similar broad array of features and control – then again I don’t know of all Dynamics class plug-ins “out there” so my apologies I’m mistaken here .

Presets:
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Only a few. Then again I’m not sure that a lot of presets for this type of plugin make too much sense.

Performance:
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My i7 950 was hardly affected in the set-up. Also, I was not able to detect any latency when using the MMultiBandDynamics plug-in in Ableton Live ver. 8.11 running on a Win7 x64 system, making the plugin fine for producing and mixing as well as mastering.Read Review