Product Reviews by KVR Members

Does exactly what it's supposed to do and it does it well. Gives you that total transparent sidechaining compression. For example instead of increasing the vocals volume you let the vocals push back other instruments - but only on the common frequency. Or, the favourite: Insert it on a bass track and let the kickdrum control /push back the bass - only where the frequencies are common and only on the kickdrum beats. A good way to clean up low end in a mix.

Best money I've ever spent on a plugin .

Originally written review in 2014 - today 2017 i increase Rating to 10 because it has saved me so much time cleaning up and "ironing out" vocal tracks. Best money I ever spent on software.

Being a happy owner MVocoder. I tried out the demo of the MultibandDynamic.

Not for masteringpurposes wich I'm sure it does well but for fix troublesome vocal recordings. I've tried lots of different vocal oriented plugins, the Waves vocal channel series and the Izoptope equivalent etc etc. There's A LOT of fancy graphics that sometimes is supposed to look like old Tube tech or Neve stuff. Sometimes I feel that they are throwing in a "cheap engine under a fancy hood" and put on a huge pricetag.

Ok, they're all nice but I found out that what I need is a multiband comp. Sometimes the recording is a bit to boomy sometimes to much highs etc etc. And even worse, differences within the track or even words itself. Or be able to control those mid frequencies without changing the lows or the highs. To have an invisible totally neutral compression.

Tried the built in in Cubase but it wasn't really "happening". Tried Waves C4, works great, but it's expensive. Tried Meldas version and i must say it works beautifully considering it's price and CPU usage. It cleans up the the vocals and irons out the peaks they way I want. And you have good control of whats happening. Coloration can be added afterwards if I want it to sound more vintage or whatever.

One thing though you can't just slam it onto a track, you need to build your own settings. There was one preset for vocals wich kind of gave me a starting point.I needed to make the settings so they fitted the vocalist and mike used at the time. After half an hours fiddling around I had finally achieved exactly what I wanted.

As I said it, didn't seem very CPU heavy - not if I compare to all the plugins I need to throw in on a vocal track just to achieve the same thing. Especially because sometimes I didn't have to use an eq or deesser at all. Alla that "tone" shaping could be done in the multibanddynamics.

Yup, keeping this one.

I give it an 8 cause I haven't tried it on mastering yet. If that works well I'll give it a 10.

Maybe I could use even use it in live situations ? (Feels a bit risky letting a mike run through a computer in live situation....others do it ..hm)

A Little odd thing ..that ads a bit of "I don't know what to call it" but it's sounds great. I used it on vocals which probably is not the first thing one think of using it on. Makes them sound somewhat slightly synthetic. I give it a 10 because it does exactly what it sets out to do, even though in a very narrow field.

Simply the best ensemble effect there is. Even if playing a simple saw wave through this one will make it sound like it's coming from a keyboard with wooden side panels and colorful big buttons from the 80s.

Wonder why noones reviewing this one ?

Becuase it's old news ? Because no one admits using it ?

Tried others, but Auto tune is still leading. Especially when it comes to more critical situations when you DON'T want it to sound autotuned. Or when you insert it on a track to have it run in realtime. A kind of "set and forget".

Guilty as charged, I admit... I use it....but only a little, sometimes..

Only bad thing, wich keeps it from getting a 10, is that the current 64-bit version 7.5.4 crashed a lot in my Cubase 7. Looked around the net and found that others had the same problems. But no one had really gotten a real reply from Antares so far. I never had trouble with the old versions.

Important to add: had these problems the first weeks. All of a sudden it all started working just fine but I haven't got a clue why. So I rate it up from 5 to 7.

I've had Alchemy for about half a year now. I must say, I really got my money's worth.

I found it very stable and reasonably CPU friendly. Often my tracks contains 4-5 instances of Alchemy. It covers almost every sound I need. Especially nowadays when I'm into more "hard to describe" organic sounds. If I'd be looking for the typical "massive unison sawtooth chord stabbing sounds" that are heard on the radio today I'd probably choose a different plugin. But of course It can do that to If needed.

The enormous possibilities and the GUI to handle all this is actually very good. Here the Youtube tutorials helped me a lot. The librarian and the way the patches can be organized is fully adequate. (Spend those extra seconds to name and tag your favorites and you will be rewarded ;).

I won't go through all the possibilities, cause there's so much and nothing is missing. A few highlights though:

You can save the" building blocks" of a sound for later use in other sounds. Oscillator settings. LFO's, envelopes, effects can be saved into their own little libraries. Such a simple thing as copy all settings from one oscillator to another is very useful. With this in mind - a majority of the presets, both the built in and the one you can purchase, are often very complex. There's a lot going on when you press a key. Impressive? Yes. But sometimes i'ts just to much according to my taste. With the ability to save certain parts of a sound It's easy to build your own version.

The "Remix sound" feature - control a bunch of parameters in one go.

It sounds great...and bad in a good way when needed. For example the resynthesis methods can sound almost natural but also like vintage digital gear. (PPG, Emulator etc). Perhaps the VA synthesis lacks some of the really low end but that's not really a problem since it does everything else so well.

The free Alchemy player gives me the possibility to duplicate everything on a laptop used for live use. (without having to force the bands keyboard player to buy the full version).

The support is good. Emails are replied and the product is updated now and then. Wich gives you as a customer a positive impression of the company.