MVocoder frustration

[Starship Krupa]

Today I sat down to try out MVocoder for the first time since I bought it in the Holiday Sale.

Although I have gotten it to work and am happy with the sound (and as always with Meldaproduction stuff, the possible rewards of delving deeper), the experience was needlessly frustrating due to a glaring omission in the documentation of a topic that is very important with vocoders.

Which is, how does one set up the routing? I've used several vocoders and I think that each one implemented carrier/modulator routing in a different way. I perused both the Quick Start and the full manual (with the usual 100 pages of generic boilerplate and fewer than 10 pages on the specific plug-in itself) and clicked on the "?" in the plug-in UI. If it's in there somewhere I can't find it.

Just a simple "insert MVocoder on the audio track you wish to modulate and route audio from the modulating track via the sidechain" is all it needs. It seems dead obvious once you know, but as I said, they all do it differently.

I finally figured it out through a combination of being generally familiar with vocoders and watching a video tutorial, so all is well, but dang, I could have been up and running in seconds with the addition of a single sentence at the beginning of the documentation.

A few words on the need for sending a nice hot signal from the modulator would also be good. Throwing MCompressor on the modulator (in my case, voice) and squashing the snot out of it would also be a helpful tip. I had a lot of fun playing around with different attack and release times in MDynamics to emphasize consonants.

Vojetch has said (in threads I've started to encourage more thorough documentation) that he is not in the business of teaching people how to use audio processors. I get that, yes, Meldaproduction stuff, once you get beyond the FreeFX Bundle, is not aimed at novices. However, there are plenty of experienced mix engineers who have never touched a vocoder. Why not give a couple of pointers? (The docs do have a bit more than usual description about what the processor does, which is a step in the right direction)

I also ran into Meldabugaboo #2, which is that the factory preset names are just combinations of random words, making it necessary to scroll through the presets one by one to get an idea of what they sound like. With something like a vocoder, it's not MWaveFolder or MSpectralDelay where it's more difficult to describe what the preset is doing. Can't see something like "16 band vocoder" or "MVP-330," or "Tupac," or "Daft Punk" or "Autobahn," or whatever for the bread and butter vocoder patches? And leave the trippy names for the trippy presets?

I know that Meldaproduction is an engineer-run business, and engineers often consider the job done once the code is ready to ship. At the end of a development cycle, it's difficult to put yourself in the mind of someone who has never seen the product you just completed. When I write manuals, I sit back for a moment and imagine that I have never seen the product before, maybe not 100% what it does because I got it in a bundle. Have mercy on the n00b!

(rant/plea over)

[mabian]

Hello,

have you tried watching this and the following parts?



-Mario

[Starship Krupa]

have you tried watching this and the following parts?

Thanks, Mario. You may have missed where I said:
"I finally figured it out through a combination of being generally familiar with vocoders and watching a video tutorial."

The point I'm trying to make is:
"I could have been up and running in seconds with the addition of a single sentence at the beginning of the documentation."

(No surprise to me, the thing sounds great, huge upgrade from TAL Vocoder II. Much helped by downloading from the Preset Exchange, so now there is a folder called "Zentralmassiv" in which the presets are named things like "Fast Vocoder" instead of "citified falconry.")

[rasmusklump]

Yes, those are the Melda manuals.
The most pages are copied generic info's from other manuals and a tiny bit plugin specific info

[Starship Krupa]

It confounds me as someone who both uses and recommends the products as it's so easily remedied.

Meldaproduction has the most engaged user base of any plug-in manufacturer I've seen, and if a call were put out to submit Quick Start tips, I'm sure that there would be a large response. I would participate. My experience with MVocoder is an example, just that sentence added to the first page of the manual. How to hook the thing up. But I would also add the other tips I've discovered like compressing the modulator and using MAutoPitch if it's a vocal. I'm using it to turn my voice from male to female, and it sounds fantastic as the modulator.

I'll say it again while I'm venting, especially for the "unique" creative plug-ins, both the ad copy on the website and the early pages of the manuals are lacking in descriptiveness. By this I mean the basic information as to what the plug-in is used for. There are superlatives about how advanced they are. And that's fine, they are advanced and do things you won't find anywhere else, but given that, how am I supposed to figure out how to use them to their full potential? I mean, they're unique. And yes, I know about the video tutorials, but not everyone learns well from those.