MFM2 Review
U-He have graciously given me a copy of their MFM2 plugin. Short for “More Feedback Matrix” MFM2 is a quad delay with full feedback routing, filters, effects and a well rounded modulation system. It is capable of covering various delay uses from resonators, to chorus, to reverb, to ping-pong delay, and more. Each of the four delays can be set in a variety of ways, with different input sources, delay rates, panning, and filters. The delay filters include allpass and band reject options which is pretty cool, especially for creating atonal resonators. Most controls can be modulated, which is where the four LFOs come into play, as well as four additional modulation slots which can be mapped to various other controls and are used for mapping the MSEGs. I found the MSEGs a bit troublesome to use. I’m not a huge fan of the zoom in/ zoom out infinite style MSEGs, and prefer loop based ones with static windows, it’s nice they are there, but I just didn’t find all that intuitive. On the subject of modulation, MFM2 can also be controlled via midi, this means you can use note gate, velocity, or even note # as modulation sources, they’ve even included a note tracked mode for the delay time if you’d like to play the delay like a monophonic physical modeling synthesizer.
MFM 2.5 is where I first took interest, the updated UI is very pleasing to look at, while a bit busy, everything is in a clear and understandable configuration. I really love the keyboard design, I wish more hardware keyboards played with grays or even colors instead of just black and white. I always factor in delay resolution in these reviews, for MFM the shortest delay is 1 ms with a 1ms resolution, of course there is also the keytracked mode, which gives finer resolution and easily maps to note values. MFM2 offers a full feedback routing system, there are many pre-routed options so signals can feed from one delay to another, as well as a full feedback routing matrix so you can patch things however you’d like. I find the feedback a bit tricky to tame, there seems to be a sharp switch between just on the edge of sustain, and over the top screaming feedback, the compressors help a little with this, but I wish there was a bit more control right around that tipping point. This becomes exacerbated by various filters and effects shifting that tipping point over quite a bit, say you get the right balance, and decide you want an all-pass filter, or phaser, suddenly the feedback is beyond control. This is understandable, but it’d be nice if there was some sort of “safe feedback” mode that helped ride that balancing point better.
The real fun with MFM is the two insert effects, each effect is in the feedback chain, so with each repeat you get more intensity. These effects include a soft clipper, decimator, phaser, side band, basic filter, granular, and diffusion. The sideband alone is such a fun effect, great for bubble squelchy textures, when added into a delay chain, it zips up or down as it recurs upon its self. The phaser is really cool, but feeds back incredibly hard, so be careful with it. Granular is used for pitch shifting which is perfect for creating shimmers, unfortunately with zero shifting, you don’t get any granular artifacts, it’d be kinda fun to play with the stretching quality without the rising or falling tones. The diffuser is nice, great for creating plate reverbs, but honestly not the best diffusion algorithms I’ve heard, I’m not the expert on reverbs, but I do prefer the option for a very smooth almost blurry diffusion algorithm. They do provide you with a variety of options, so it’s worth playing with and exploring.
Combining different delay rates, filter types, and effects into an intermingled feedback system allows for a large variety of experimentation, and MFM leans into this. Experimental is the key here, not all experiments are a success, and sometimes the conditions are very sensitive. There’s a lot of sour spots in MFM when you start playing around with heavy delay, there’s plenty of sweet spots too, but you have to find them, and by not holding your hand, U-He are allowing you to find and create and decide for yourself where those sweet spots are. MFM2 is like a delay laboratory, and because of this, you can use it to craft many of your own effects. Resonators, chorus, loopers, and reverbs all use delay to achieve their results, so by modulating parameters you can actually craft a whole arsenal of tools from this one. I should mention I did find creating stutters a bit finicky, it’s possible, but not always the cleanest results, you’ll want to turn off the latency in the settings menu, they even ask you if you are ok with glitches. The most fun I’ve had was playing around with short delays with various filters and effects in the feedback path, turning off the latency makes this even more fun and really lets you get into those fun digital artifacts.
There’s a lot of cool things in this one, and if you love to explore and adventure into more fragile sonic territories, this is a good plugin to take a look at. I’m not sure I’d use this as a daily delay, I like to have something simple I can just get rolling with for basic delay purposes, but I absolutely love these more experimental delays for sound design and resampling. I’ll certainly play around with and explore MFM2 some more in the future, there’s a lot for me to uncover with this one still.
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MFM 2: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/2-Effects/10-Delay/9610-MFM2?a_aid=61c378ab215d5