MSPECTRALDELAY Review
Melda MSpectralDelay is exactly what the name says, a spectral delay. Even if you’re not fond of Melda UI, this one is worth checking out as there are few alternatives. It’s similar in many ways to GS-DSP Magic Delay, but with it’s own style and flavor. Spectral delays are very interesting effects, essentially they allow you to delay different frequencies by various amounts to warp a sound over time. For example you can use a spectral delay to have the high end frequencies repeat only, or have the low end take longer to play. It’s quite a strange effect with limitless possibilities.
MSpectralDelay has a few major sections, for this review we’ll be looking at the edit tab, which gets into the guts of this effect, but there’s also presets that almost act as their own mini effects if the editor is too complex. The edit tab is broken down into a global delay section, a transformation section, some various settings, and a curve editor for various controls.
The basic spectral delay effect is achieved with the delay curve, The X axis of this curve is the input frequency, and Y axis is a multiplier percentage for delay time. By default this is a line going from 0 to 100% up the spectrum, this means whatever the delay time is, the lowest frequency will have 0% delay, the middle frequencies will have 50% the delay time, and a smooth transition between. As you bring up the delay time, you can hear a sweep as the various frequency ranges take time to catch up to the delayed signal. What’s really cool here is that you can draw any shape to transform and smear audio in insane ways. There’s even some custom curves, for example, steps, which makes it easy to create distinct jumps between wider frequency ranges.
MSpectralDelay gives you a curve for feedback as well, which can let you reduce the resonance of different frequency ranges as the signal echoes. The next section is a transformation editor, another spectral effect similar to MTransformer, this transformation is applied to the repeats creating even wilder spectral chaos. The transform function lets you remap various frequencies and also has a pitch and frequency shifter. Combining these various spectral morphing effects is difficult to tame, but makes for some of the weirdest experimentation.
I tend to use MSpectralDelay for creative sound design, particularly wet, goopy and watery alien sounds. It’s a very fun tool for transforming vocals or even beats and can be perfect for creating atmospheres. As with most spectral effects, I do suggest sampling from this one rather than using it directly in a mix, it can be too easy to loose your magic settings or a particular moment with these tools. Definitely give this one a spin if it is in your collection, there’s not many effects out there like this, and the ones that do exist all have unique qualities.