MW Leveler... what does it do?
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This forum is for seeking solutions to technical problems involving Digital Performer and/or plug-ins on MacOS, as well as feature requests, criticisms, comparison to other DAWs.
This forum is for seeking solutions to technical problems involving Digital Performer and/or plug-ins on MacOS, as well as feature requests, criticisms, comparison to other DAWs.
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PrimeMover
- Posts: 217
- Joined: Thu Aug 16, 2007 12:19 pm
- Primary DAW OS: MacOS
- Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
- Contact:
MW Leveler... what does it do?
This is my really stupid new topic for the month. But I've (tried) reading the manual for MW Leveler, and I'm totally lost on what the heck it does. It's a compressor/limiter, I understand that much, but when playing around with it, I couldn't hear any difference in level or tone to my mix, other than generally reducing the volume. It has no presets to start me off with, and for a relatively simple-looking user interface, I just couldn't, for the life of me, figure out exactly how to work the damn thing. I've heard glowing reports about it, and since I've been doing a bunch of mixdowns as of late, I'd love to try adding it to my toolkit, but are their any good tutorials around that wouldn't make my eyes glaze over in the first two sentances?
Mac Pro (Quad 2GHz) | 7GB RAM | Mac OS 10.5.4 (Leopard)
DP6 & DP 5.13 | Kontakt 3 | EWQLSO Gold XP
MOTU 8pre | Alesis QS8.1 Synthesizer
******
DP6 crashes with ProVerb
DP6 & DP 5.13 | Kontakt 3 | EWQLSO Gold XP
MOTU 8pre | Alesis QS8.1 Synthesizer
******
DP6 crashes with ProVerb
Well, the more pro level guys can chime in with input but you can try this.
Try compression times of 1.2- 2.2 or a little higher, turn the knob and see if you hear the difference.
The "make-up" gain knob is to the right ( not in front of DP now) and that brings the gain back to "normal" . The far right knob sweeps freq. ( of compression ) and changes the sound too. Check Users Guide on this.
The plug smoothes a track out in the mix for me. I like it. Play with it, it seems easy to use.
And as Magic D said, use the" standby" button instead of bypass button. also in the book somewhere.
Try compression times of 1.2- 2.2 or a little higher, turn the knob and see if you hear the difference.
The "make-up" gain knob is to the right ( not in front of DP now) and that brings the gain back to "normal" . The far right knob sweeps freq. ( of compression ) and changes the sound too. Check Users Guide on this.
The plug smoothes a track out in the mix for me. I like it. Play with it, it seems easy to use.
And as Magic D said, use the" standby" button instead of bypass button. also in the book somewhere.
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jcfelice88keys
- Posts: 35
- Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2008 7:57 pm
- Primary DAW OS: Unspecified
Watch Part 4 of DP6 Demo at 2008 NAMM
Hello PrimeMover,
The attached link from YouTube will show what the MW Leveler is for, and how it is used. This link is Part 4 of a 6 Part series, taped at the 2008 Winter NAMM show. The MW Leveler is discussed starting about 2 minutes into the 8 minute video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0E8wafy ... re=related
Unlike a regular compressor that indiscriminately squashes all of a given signal, including vocal tracks' sibilants and cymbals' initial transients, the MW Leveler is modeled after an optical device that effectively monitors the "shape" of the input waveform and works more on the tail of it.
When you said that it just lowered the overall sound, you were correct; but possibly, you did not notice that the initial transients did not sound electronically distorted. If you were to squash a vocal track, say, by 10dB with a regular compressor, you would notice that the sibilants were completely distorted or even missing -- not so with the MW Leveler.
Regarding the "standby" button, this was modelled after the original unit, because the photo electric cell needed some warm-up time before operating. In the real world, the engineer would run a few bars' worth of music through the leveler to warm up the photo electric cell circuitry, and then rewind tape and start again. The included MW Leveler standby button feeds the input signal into the circuitry to keep it "warmed up", and just passes the unprocessed signal to the output.
Have a look at the above link, and see/hear for yourself.
Cheers,
Joe <jcfelice88keys>
The attached link from YouTube will show what the MW Leveler is for, and how it is used. This link is Part 4 of a 6 Part series, taped at the 2008 Winter NAMM show. The MW Leveler is discussed starting about 2 minutes into the 8 minute video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0E8wafy ... re=related
Unlike a regular compressor that indiscriminately squashes all of a given signal, including vocal tracks' sibilants and cymbals' initial transients, the MW Leveler is modeled after an optical device that effectively monitors the "shape" of the input waveform and works more on the tail of it.
When you said that it just lowered the overall sound, you were correct; but possibly, you did not notice that the initial transients did not sound electronically distorted. If you were to squash a vocal track, say, by 10dB with a regular compressor, you would notice that the sibilants were completely distorted or even missing -- not so with the MW Leveler.
Regarding the "standby" button, this was modelled after the original unit, because the photo electric cell needed some warm-up time before operating. In the real world, the engineer would run a few bars' worth of music through the leveler to warm up the photo electric cell circuitry, and then rewind tape and start again. The included MW Leveler standby button feeds the input signal into the circuitry to keep it "warmed up", and just passes the unprocessed signal to the output.
Have a look at the above link, and see/hear for yourself.
Cheers,
Joe <jcfelice88keys>