MeldaProduction Interview With CEO Vojtech Meluzin
Earlier this month, we had the opportunity of interviewing Vojtech Meluzin, the CEO of MeldaProduction. This company is responsible for some of the most innovative plugins in the industry today not to mention The Best Free FX Bundle ever. If you haven’t had a chance to check that out, click this link and pull it down now!
Alright, now let’s get into it.
A Video Interview with Vojtech Meluzin and Plugin Boutique can be found at the bottom of this post
Can you tell everyone a little about yourself? Where you’re from, your background, and how MeldaProduction came to be?
Well, I’m from the Czech Republic and I was a musician from my early childhood. I actually
started sort of doing music on the early Atari with Cubase, I was like 8 years old or
something :).
In elementary school, I created my first rock “album”, on an early 486
PC and that was quite a challenge since I couldn’t actually listen to the music until the
export.
It was so slow, that even with the say 6 tracks I had there and a few internal
equalizers, it wasn’t able to actually play it :). “Good” old times.
Anyways I already came up with the “awesome” name MeldaProduction when I was like
10, but until my graduation from the university I actually didn’t know what exactly I’m
going to do, and at the end, it was kind of a coincidence, that I started developing music software.
What Was The First MeldaProduction Plugin?
I created the early MDrummer as a few school projects because I hated doing pointless
things, so I always did something “that I actually wanted to use”. At this time, I had literally no
idea about the 3rd party plugins out there.
But then a friend (sort of) of mine attacked my ego by saying I don’t finish anything and “let’s sell that thing”
I was like “yeah, let’s do that” :). I improved it a lot and that guy was kinda worthless as expected, but
after so much work I thought, I should do it myself! And from there a very long and rocky
path began.
So it all started with MDrummer and I didn’t actually intend to make anything
else at that time, but here we are today with a portfolio of coincidences. Life is full of surprises :).
What was the idea or inspiration behind MRhythmizer?
I’ll be honest here, MRhythmizer is more than highly inspired by ImageLine’s Grossbeat.
I liked that thing and it wasn’t for Mac, so I thought I should give it a try and add some of the
Melda mojo, and here we are, one of the best sellers.
I’m actually surprised this one is one of the best sellers, I mean it’s cool, but not something I would use in every song. Another surprise.
Does MeldaProduction have any plans to create classic plugin emulations?
It depends on what that means. Many people know I have perhaps a bit specific view
about analog stuff. It depends a lot on what kind of “device” we are talking about. Take
compressors – most people start measuring these things, do some circuit emulation, etc.
because that’s actually quite straightforward – you are trying to mimic what the original does.
To me, that doesn’t make any sense. You’d be going in circles, recreating the original with
all its positives but also flaws, and there are so many in the analog world. We actually compared
a popular 1176 compressor (emulation) with the original, and the company went so far, they started
adding noise (ugly noise) a lot more than the original and a lot uglier… what the hell :).
See, digital and analog are very different things. All have their strengths and weaknesses.
Trying to emulate one in the other by mimicking the same processes is nonsense to me.
Imagine you’d start using electric cars, but somehow you’d like the original steam engines, so
you’d start boiling water using electricity, that’s nonsense and with digital/analog audio it’s the
exact same thing.
MTurboComp (The Ultimate Compressor?)
So instead, I created MTurboComp based on what the digital computers are good at –algorithms
and it’s based on machine learning from the outputs of the classic analog compressors.
The analog classics aren’t in any way perfect, but they are designed well – history had decades
to test them and prove they are well useful on a variety of audio materials.
So MTurboComp mimics the response of these without adding any of the noise, doesn’t come up with the limited, often crazy, user interface. It’s just a different approach. So this is an example of a classic emulation plugin we already have.
MSound Factory (This is Interesting)
Another example would be the new MSoundFactory. Again this one is a playground for
sound design, but what makes it great are first the oscillators and the modulation capabilities
allowing to mimic analog behavior. The oscillators are kind of the biggest problem in digital
audio.
Essentially the only drawback (IMHO) of digital processing is the aliasing caused by the limited
sampling rate since in analog you have in a way near-infinite sampling rate. In 99.99% of cases,
it doesn’t really matter.
This can get bad with distortion and sound generators (especially oscillators). The simple solution is to oversample the generator, but that means proportionally higher CPU usage (16x and more)… We did some complex approaches and it is completely alias-free.
Unless you start modulating things, in which case the oversampling is the only way, for now.
And analog behavior? Well, the analog has one other advantage – it’s not perfect :).
The problem with perfection is that things start to repeat and repeated sounds, even fractions of a
millisecond are quite horrific for the human ear. So we introduced the “Analog” feature, which starts varying
lots of things (under your control) so that no two notes or elements in time are the same…And that really does some magic.
So another sort of analog emulation, just generalized, because with digital we CAN do more than analog, we just need to imagine the possibilities and go the more complex road.
How are you able to keep your plugins so CPU friendly?
Hehe, I’m an optimization freak :). I started programming in assembler when I was like 10, so
these things kinda stayed with me even now, when assembler is pretty much useless, but the
principles are the same.
I really like optimizing the hell out of things :). I wish I had more time for that though. It seems like MeldaProduction is THE company to ask for features for anything these days, so people are keeping me rather busy :).
What’s next for MeldaProduction?
We’ve just released a huge drum pack (October 10th). After that, there will be a new MDrumReplacer.
But then it will be all about MSoundFactory, as I want to penetrate the market with instruments.
It may well be the most powerful instrument out there and offers great value for 3rd parties as we won’t require royalties or expensive licensing fees if you create and profit from sounds made using our engine like some other companies do (that are just samplers).
Aside from that, I want to finally dive into the “mixing revolution”. Most of it is just in my head, for years actually, but as I said, people kept me busy :). I think the process of mixing is just way too old school. We haven’t progressed over the years (nearly a century) and there’s a hell of a lot to improve, so I’d like to give it ago and reinvent the whole thing from scratch.
I also want to start checking some more machine learning things, which could be useful for
some restoration, dereverberation, and other weird creative things. We’ll see how that goes :).
You can find out more about MeldaProduction and their plugins on their website.
