MeldaProduction: Free Plugins that Sound Incredible

hey friends so if you're a music producer on YouTube no doubt you're likely getting bombarded by ads trying to convince you to buy more and more shiny plugins but what if I told you that you can get some amazing sounding free plugins right now that in many cases do more and sound better than expensive plugins enter melda's mree effects bundle which is maybe the best free thing that music producers can get now I'm not paid by Melda this is simply my own opinion over the next little bit I'm going to be making some videos dedicated to free plugins so make sure that you subscribe and hit the Bell so you can know when the next video comes up let's get [Music] it first learn to use this then I'll teach you to use this okay so my introduction to Mel of plugins was when I was doing some uh teaching on synthesis and I needed an oscilloscope so I downloaded the free effects bundle and just got this uh M oscilloscope and never looked back and never opened any of the other plugins and I essentially can't believe how much I've been missing out on so this is what this Baseline looks like through the oscilloscope and so we can see using the oscilloscope that there is some movement to this Baseline but for the most part it's kind of subby and it would probably get lost in a mix because it doesn't have that many harmonics to help it be heard so how do we add harmonics of course we use a saturator now first of all I'll go ahead and reach for an Ableton saturator just to show you what I'm talking about but the normal process that I would use is I would turn the drive up and you know I choose a I don't know medium curve or something I would turn the drive up and then turn the output down by a similar amount because essentially with any gain dependent effect I want to make sure that I have gain matched the on and off state of the effect so I can make good decisions right so here's without the saturator and when I turn the saturator on you'll see a much fatter if you will waveform [Music] but because of the transfer curve of this saturator I have to mess with the output to try to get the RMS level to be similar or similar loudness right this is kind of an annoying process right so going back to my plugins I can choose The Magik magy mag I don't know how to say it but essentially what this plug-in does from Melda is that it listens to the input signal prior to the effects and then it actually changes the gain based on the input signal it's really awesome so how to set this up en Ableton is really simple you just choose the three pigments which is essentially the name of this track if you will you can see that it's three pigments I'm just choosing the pree signal as the side chain input now mag Z can listen to that signal and compare it to the signal after processing and it'll actually adjust the gain based on the signal so I'm going to turn the drive all the way down again and check this out as I turn the drive up we can see this gain reduction go down this is amazing a lot of the times with these Auto gain plugins you have to actually put something before and after the plugins that you're working with in this case you can just easily choose the side chain input so don't overlook this one it's incredible now as promised I'm only going to use Melda plugin so let's get rid of this Ableton saturator and remember this mag C is going to be running the whole time and now we're going to move on to something else let's go ahead and use saturation in the form of melda's solution for saturator called M saturator so this is just incredible I love this saturator I'm going to use it all the time now now that I've discovered it but essentially I can use the same process where I'm just turning up the input I'm not worried about compensating the output because that's what the mag C plugin is going to be doing so let's go ahead and do [Music] that so that's what the first algorithm sounds like and M saturator is a multi-algorithm saturator similar to Ableton saturator and these are the different clipping curves it has so we have uh soft clipping 1 through 4 some digital clipping modes and then a wave folder so the soft Clippers kind of sound similar but they're all like that and we'll just go through all the algorithms real quick we can see the oscilloscope reacting to those different clipping curbs right now I'm going to leave it on soft for for now because I want to show you something else we also have a compander and what a compander essentially is doing is it's adding a compressor to the signal that's driving the saturator all right and we can use this in some really interesting ways I have a lot of input going on to this so we can really hear the difference when I enable this take a listen essentially what the compander is going to help us do is level the signal a little bit going into the saturator so that we have a more smooth result but of course using this is actually going to boost the gain going into the saturator so I'm going to turn the output down a bit let's let's try to get it so that it sounds similar when it's enabled and [Music] disabled cool so around ne6 sounds right to me now what's really fun about using this compander is that I can dial in the attack essentially you can make it so that the compander is late if you will and what that will do is it will allow for the transient to sound and have some more detail to it so when it's all the way down when the attack is instant it's going to be very smooth right there's no difference but as I increase attack take a listen to [Music] this right there's some more detail it takes a while for the compander to do what it does right so that's a really interesting thing let's go ahead and turn that off for now and then we'll also explore harmonics so of course we're making harmonics already with saturator but what's cool about the M saturators that you you also have these second third fourth and fifth order harmonics that you can dial in different amounts of and this is a separate process than this saturation and it's a new stage so check this out you can really dial in some interesting [Music] sounds [Music] so it can get really really crazy out there right now let's go ahead and disable this and take a look at something else we still have this first saturator stage going on and I should point out that we have this analog control and what this does is it adds even harmonics uh behaving similarly to how an analog saturation would happen in the analog domain of course nothing in plug-in world is analog but you can add some of the effects that an analog processor might do so um in its default state it's at 50% but you can go really crazy with [Music] this and at zero we're just going to be using this soft one transfer curve and as you add the analog we're going to add more and more even harmonics so let's go ahead and add everything that we've done this far it's going to be wild we'll dial some of these things back a little [Music] bit now what's fun about doing this is that I can use the oscilloscope to take a look at my waveform and make sure that I'm not I'm not half rectifying everything so that we only have in the positive domain and we don't have any in the negative domain of course doing that is going to make the waveform sound thinner and thinner and thinner right there's a couple ways we can do this we can dial the input back of course now the input control becomes very powerful now because essentially the more gain we feed into these harmonic processors the more harmonics they're going to generate and therefore we're going to get some wildly different sounds by just adjusting this now that we've done all this crazy work down here I'm going to turn the attack down a little bit to get a little bit less of that transient [Music] detail cool so that sounds pretty good now of course the fully wet signal might be a bit much for some people so we can back that off a little bit using this dry wet control okay so we got it sounding pretty cool let's go ahead and move on the next thing I want to do is use the frequency shifter because this thing is wild now the frequency shifter not only shifts frequencies up and down but it also has a delay line put into it allowing you to make some really interesting effects one of my favorite things to do with the frequency shifter is have a very low amount of frequency shift and to dial the dry wet back halfway let's go ahead and take a listen to this zeroed out now essentially all we have now is a delay line because there's no shifting happening so if I turn up [Music] feedback right we just have a comb filter essentially right but let's go ahead and do the thing that I was talking about I love to just add a little bit of shift here the smallest amount that I can get away with and then dial the dry wet back take a listen to the movement that gets [Music] added now if I want to add some comb filtering this would sound cool too so I'm going to add some [Music] feedback super awesome sounding right okay so because of the particular effect that I'm going for I'm not going to mess with any of these other controls essentially you can sync the delay and do all kinds of interesting things with that but let's go ahead and move on to the next one so now this plugin is really interesting this is the m free form phase essentially I think what this tool was designed to do was to help you kind of uh get a phase adjustment for uh different microphones that you might be using on different sources and maybe that's the normal way to use this but you can also do some really crazy things one thing that I've learned that I really like to do with this thing is just to make a random whatever curve right and when I play this we can hear a kind of a killer Hearts disperser kind of sound over top of the base and remember disperser costs money this is free there's a big difference between disperser in this and we'll get into that in a moment but essentially here's what it sounds like bypassed here's what it sounds like with the free phase just the wildest sound now check this out you can turn the depth up to just unimaginably insane amounts now what's actually happening here well essentially we're changing the phase of the waveform as it goes up and down the frequency spectrum okay so as we change notes right the phase adjustment is going to sound different and that's what's really fun about this so if you do a really crazy thing kind of in the low ranges where the fundamental is you get some really sweeping Wild results especially with the depth up [Music] high now this is a spectral effect of course so it's taking a lot of latency to create this sound this is something that you're going to want to do on the sound design stage and you're going to want to print this to audio this is definitely not something you want to leave on in a set right it's just going to be annoying eventually for you so we you can choose the quality though and of course the lower quality that you get the less sampling that you're going to have and so because of that you're going to get uh less clear notes coming out of this but maybe that's the kind of effect you're going for you're going for like a lowii kind of crappy [Music] sound right we can hear some a tonal uh sounds coming there and if you go up to extreme of course you'll get um less a tonal sounds and you get a sound that's similar to this but of course along with that you also get this uh kind of very apparent pre- ringing that's happening uh M freeform phase is a linear phase effect and so of course for it to achieve the effect that it does it has to do a thing called pre- ringing um disperser from kiler Hearts is actually a uh nonlinear effect so what it does is it actually has some post ringing um so essentially for transient sounds it might not make so much sense to use this m free form phase like on drums for example because you can hear this wh listen to the the beginning of this right so you can imagine what that might sound like on a kick but on a bass man that is really pleasing and super fun to listen to right if you put the quality lower of course you're going to get less of it and of course if you turn the depth down you'll get less of it right so you could get away with lower depth at extreme you can hear how fast that uh pre- ringing is but of course maybe you want the pre- ringing I think it's kind of funny sounding and and it actually can uh you know be a sound design tool if that's what you're going for yeah and if you make this really Jagged and [Music] wild you just get some really really crazy sounds [Music] right awesome okay so maybe one more creative effect we could use is the this mcom I really like this thing so let's go ahead and get the oscilloscope back up there now mcom is essentially for comb filters and something that it can do is some input tracking using some of the paid features with mcom but we can actually call some of these up by clicking on presets and going to the pitch tracker and I really enjoy this uh move a first few harmonics or move a weird set let's go ahe and take a listen to a weird set first I love the sound of this [Music] thing [Music] so here's without the [Music] mcom here's with [Music] it that's pretty wild right let's try a different one we're going to switch it over to remove first few harmonics super cool right okay so this comb might be a bit much I'm going to bring this back down to about 50% here and let's go back earlier in the chain and take a look at our saturator and try to dial this in so that we've got a little bit more of those harmonics up [Music] [Applause] high [Music] oh yeah Okay so we've just got to do the ab test right so let's go ahead and get rid of everything except for we'll leave the the oscilloscope up and what I'm going to do is I'm going to group everything before the auto gain and turn it off and then on and we can listen to to the autog gained difference between using these Mela plugins and then not using them so here's without [Music] it and then with [Music] it all right so let's be honest Melda plugins are pretty ugly looking but you can clearly hear that they sound amazing at the the end of the day most new plugins that are coming out are simply repackaging the same functionality behind pretty controls and if you're new to the space likely you're shopping more with your eyes than with your ears a word of advice if you've got the cash to buy a bunch of plugins You' do much better to instead invest in knowing how to use what you already have so if you like my teaching style I offer some insanely packed online courses for Ableton that cover every single aspect of production from songwriting to mixing to sound design to live performance we have a really active private Discord of welcoming and supportive folks where you can get your questions answered in near real time and you can get some really kind feedback on your mixes and more now if you're interested you can find out more about my courses and learn some stuff in the process by watching my free Ableton Workshop linked up here or down in the comments and in the description and as always thanks for watching everybody at the time of this shoot this channel is about to pass 100,000 subscribers and that's just totally mind-blowing to me so thanks so much for all the support if you like this kind of thing you know what to do like comment subscribe much love see you next time

Channel: Seed To Stage

Views: 13,622

Keywords: meldaproduction, free plugins, ableton live 11 tutorial, ableton, ableton live, MOscilloscope, MSaturator, MFreqShifter, MFreeformPhase, MComb

Id: n4ew64M7QmI

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2023