Melda MVibratoMB $9 (80% off) at WA.

[Jason Neudorf]

Purchased, because all the Melda stuff got upgraded to 16.05 and it gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

[Brian Walton]

2 hours ago, Jason Neudorf said:

Purchased, because all the Melda stuff got upgraded to 16.05 and it gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

I added it to the installs for demo when I did the upgrade. Short demo isn't exactly resulting in anything inspiring though.  Yet still debating if I should buy it or not.  

[bitflipper]

I was listening to some Tomita the other day and thinking how cool his cosmic string washes still sound 50 years later. So I decided to try to recreate them.

All I knew was that he used many layers and lots of effects. What kinds of effects would have been available to him in 1973? Tape delays and reverb, basically. Maybe a chorus. So I started with various harmonically-rich sounds and began throwing anything I had on hand at them.

The combination that came closest - so far - was a a low-res pipe organ (from the free Kawai N1 that someone on this forum reminded me existed) run through MVibratoMB (Rotary 4 model), Valhalla Delay (Quartz algorithm) and some reverb (FabFilter Pro-R, but others worked just as well). I layered this on top of an existing string part (Amadeus) and added volume automation to give the pipe organ a slow attack. 

I'm still fiddling with it, but so far it sounds very Tomita-like. Given the complex fx chain, I'm now thinking about eventually putting it into a Kontakt instrument for convenience. Still on my to-do list: try some of Omnisphere's choir patches underneath the pipe organ.

All inspired by a $9 plugin I didn't need.

[Brian Walton]

57 minutes ago, bitflipper said:

I was listening to some Tomita the other day and thinking how cool his cosmic string washes still sound 50 years later. So I decided to try to recreate them.

All I knew was that he used many layers and lots of effects. What kinds of effects would have been available to him in 1973? Tape delays and reverb, basically. Maybe a chorus. So I started with various harmonically-rich sounds and began throwing anything I had on hand at them.

The combination that came closest - so far - was a a low-res pipe organ (from the free Kawai N1 that someone on this forum reminded me existed) run through MVibratoMB (Rotary 4 model), Valhalla Delay (Quartz algorithm) and some reverb (FabFilter Pro-R, but others worked just as well). I layered this on top of an existing string part (Amadeus) and added volume automation to give the pipe organ a slow attack. 

I'm still fiddling with it, but so far it sounds very Tomita-like. Given the complex fx chain, I'm now thinking about eventually putting it into a Kontakt instrument for convenience. Still on my to-do list: try some of Omnisphere's choir patches underneath the pipe organ.

All inspired by a $9 plugin I didn't need.

I'm not sure what Tomita's rig looked like, but just about all the effects guitarists use today were already available by 1973.

Gilmour had already converted a Leslie for guitar use by the end of the 1960s.  The Uni-Vibe was also already on the market.  Phasers, Flangers, Chorus, Delay (of various types), reverb, fuzz, tremolo, vibrato, wah, and even the talk box etc were available to anyone with money.

There hasn't been much in terms of a new category post 1973.

Boss Slow gear (i.e. the volume automation) was one of those things that came after though.

Edited April 30, 2023 by Brian Walton