Melda Vintage Rotary

They Say

 
MVintageRotary is a perfect sounding rotary simulation based on the famous Leslie® cabinets. Unlike the original, this one also features more advanced features. Designed for organs, but perfect for keyboards, guitars and many other instruments.
 
Part of the typical organ sound is the analog distortion, which MVintageRotary emulates with pristine accuracy. Well, not only that, you can bring in some more hardcore digital distortion and the available drive levels are of course much higher than in the original, courtesy of digital processing!
 
 

http://www.meldaproduction.com/plugins/product.php?id=MVintageRotary
 
Its 20 Euros on an introductory offer and free for MTotalBundle and MCreativeBundle owners.  i wonder if this will finally nail the distorted Leslie sound accurately. There is a demo, but I wont be at my DAW for another two weeks so I can't try it out.
 
 

Distortion is a critical component to any Leslie simulation. Most classic Leslies had underpowered amplifiers, typically 40W, which were easily overdriven. The horns were also prone to distortion. Jon Lord famously powered his Leslie with a 100W Marshall head for the distortion. But even when not intentionally overdriven, they always had a relatively high level of distortion and noise. It's part of the characteristic sound of a Leslie.
 
When Xils Labs introduced their LX-122 Leslie sim earlier this year, the most frequent complaint heard about it was that it didn't get the distortion right. I have a Hammond XK-1, which includes a Leslie simulation. My biggest complaint about it is the built-in distortion effect only works well at extreme Jon Lord-type levels but doesn't sound realistic at gentler settings. I intend to demo this plugin with fingers crossed. $26 is a damn good price - if the thing works well.
 
[EDIT: First Impressions]
Well I've been mucking about with this thing for about an hour, and I gotta say I'm liking it a lot. There are a few features missing, or at least that I haven't found yet, such as an adjustment for braking and acceleration times or curves. There are also no mic position options, although the Width control kinda sorta does that.
 
One of my primary criteria is that the more subtle distortion settings be credible, and this plugin achieves that fairly well. It can get gritty without ever being fizzy, even at maximum Drive. I haven't figured out what the "Character" setting does yet, but it seems to be a filter on the distortion harmonics.


Another mystery setting is called "Modulator & automation protection", with 5 choices of ascending CPU consumption. I don't yet know what that one's about. There does not appear to be an actual manual (there's a folder called "Documentation" but it's empty), just the popup help text, and it makes no mention of this nor any other configuration settings.
 
The Absorption knob is a nice touch. At around 75% it helps the organ sit in the mix better.
 
AGC is an unexpected bonus. It means you can experiment with or automate the Drive parameter without actually raising the volume. I wish more plugin vendors offered such a feature.
 
As with all of Vojtech's newer plugins, this one's got a resizable UI. Yay. This vendor often gets dissed on KVR for his sometimes-confusing UI designs, but this particular plugin is about as clean and simple and obvious as I've seen. Except for some of the more obscure settings, nobody will struggle to understand this plugin from the get-go.
 
Also following other meldaproductions products' conventions, this plugin allows you to morph between up to 8 different configurations. I haven't experimented with this yet, but it looks like a cool feature. I imagine I'd use it to crank the drive and treble controls during an organ solo, or some other scenario where you want to automate multiple settings with a single envelope.
 
Only one real negative so far: with oversampling enabled it's pretty CPU-hungry.

I'm glad someone posted this.  Thanks, bit, for your quick review.
 
I know there are quite a few here that really know their rotary effects, so I'm interested to hear further opinions on this one.
 
 

I might have to test this one out, just because it's a great deal if it's a realistic sim. The overdrive sim is the key though. Leslies have a very particular growl to them when pushed.
 
I have a Hammond XK-1 (like Bitflipper) and agree that the built-in overdrive sim in the XK-1 is fizzy/hashy sounding. I picked up a Neo Ventilator a few months ago. Combining a little of the built-in XK-1 overdrive (which adds a bit of sizzle) to the Vent's warm, growly overdrive sounds awesome. A big improvement and very realistic sounding. Great lesllie sim, not cheap, but money well spent for my tastes. I'm very happy with that and no longer use my Motion-Sound rig.

RE: Neo Ventilator
 
I tried one out a couple years ago and was impressed, but the $400 price tag put me off. Now I've decided I need one and it appears the product is no longer manufactured. And nobody's letting go of them second-hand.
 
Bonzo, have you tried using it as an external insert in SONAR?

How much were they at L&M? It could be worth the 2-hour road trip.

Hmm....now their Vancouver store is showing "no stock", and checking all their locations, there's only stock available in the Oshawa store, which is on Ontario. They could transfer one to Vancouver, but you'd probably want to call one of their Vancouver stores to confirm and arrange that. Their website shows them listed at $495.00Cdn, but you might be able to barter a little.

Thanks, Mr. Ghost. Maybe the new one won't be 500 bucks! Yowch.
 

rtucker55
Anyone here using the MVintageRotary 7.11 in Win7 64 and X2a 64? I'm having issues and not sure if it's just me.
 
I insert it in the audio track FX bin for the soft synth and the track meters go bonkers. Sometimes they show a signal when playing sometimes not. Sometimes they even show a signal when not playing...
 
Also, have not been successful in using either the sustain pedal or modulation wheel to change the rotation speed. Very little documentation on this currently.
 
I am sending tech support an email but thought I'd check here first.

I have just tried this on my laptop. X2a 64 bit, Win 7, ASIO for all with on board sound and totally unsuited for audio. The only source of organ sounds I have is TTS1. It seems to work OK, certainly none of the issues you report.
 
As for controlling with MIDI, you would need to insert it as a synth to get it to respond to MIDI. One MIDI track cannot be sent to two destinations in X2. So you would have to find another way of routing your keyboard to the effect and the Organ VST.

Glyn Barnes

rtucker55
Anyone here using the MVintageRotary 7.11 in Win7 64 and X2a 64? I'm having issues and not sure if it's just me.
 
I insert it in the audio track FX bin for the soft synth and the track meters go bonkers. Sometimes they show a signal when playing sometimes not. Sometimes they even show a signal when not playing...
 
Also, have not been successful in using either the sustain pedal or modulation wheel to change the rotation speed. Very little documentation on this currently.
 
I am sending tech support an email but thought I'd check here first.

I have just tried this on my laptop. X2a 64 bit, Win 7, ASIO for all with on board sound and totally unsuited for audio. The only source of organ sounds I have is TTS1. It seems to work OK, certainly none of the issues you report.
 
As for controlling with MIDI, you would need to insert it as a synth to get it to respond to MIDI. One MIDI track cannot be sent to two destinations in X2. So you would have to find another way of routing your keyboard to the effect and the Organ VST.

Thanks Glyn for giving that a shot.
 
I received an email back from Melda support and they say I need to talk with Cakewalk as it sounds like a Sonar issue.
For grins I'll give Cake support a call today
 
 
I'll give it a shot in studio one and see how it works there.
 
Thanks again,
Rick

Here's a short demo I did using this plugin. It's the intro to Deep Purple's "Lazy", that I recorded a while back as part of a collaboration with some fellow forum folk. I automated both the speed and drive controls.
 
https://soundcloud.com/bitflipper/mvintagerotary-demo

Bitflipper:  Love the growl.  Nice gradual increasing drive.  Very realistic.  As rtucker55 asked:  Did you manually draw the automation......?

bitflipper
Here's a short demo I did using this plugin. It's the intro to Deep Purple's "Lazy", that I recorded a while back as part of a collaboration with some fellow forum folk. I automated both the speed and drive controls.
 
https://soundcloud.com/bitflipper/mvintagerotary-demo

That's sold it to me.

Thanks for the heads-up!

I have always enjoyed using the free Nubi B3 organ and Spinner Leslie. They are a tad hard to find now but these links seem to still be valid. Never had any crashes or glitches and they are absolutely free, so worth trying.
 
http://freemusicsoftware.org/462
 
http://freemusicsoftware.org/1822