Ohm Force is perhaps the most odd plug-in company out there, and that's a good thing. Now they've made a plug-in to kill your sounds, and that's an even better thing! Time for some serious murder? Enter Ohmicide: Melohman.
What is it?
Charles Manson incarnated in Hades? Who knows... But it's made up of four frequency bands each with their own distortion, feedback generator, noise gate, dynamics and so on. On top of that - and with that - you can come up with more types of distorted chaos than your organized mind can comprehend. Besides, it's a melohman, which means it's made for live action. In practice this means morphing features and randomizing.
In detail
So what do we got here? Every band has the same features:
- The noise gate with 'threshold', 'attack', 'release' and 'amount'
- The typical control room features: solo and mute buttons, mix knob, volume fader and pan knob.
- 'Gain', 'body' and 'shape' knobs, feedback controls, 'bias' fader and finally a 'type' switch which lets you choose between 'none', 'standard', 'xxx' and 'odd', each of these also have various settings.
There are some general settings as well found outside of the band controls, among these you find 'PP freq', 'PP shape', 'pre disto', 'trim' and another mix knob. As I'm sure you understand from this, you can come up with a myriad of different sounds.
The GUI is beautiful in a grotesque way. Seriously, it's one of the best looking plug-ins out there. It's white with a touch of red, the fonts are nice and psychotic, the faders look like they were copied from the new Korg DJ mixers and there is blood splatter on it topped with a random serial killer on startup. What's not to like?
Some other cool and not so cool features
There are a few things in the GUI that will be up for discussion though. When you touch a knob or fader you will see a few values around it like in little bubbles (scroll down and watch the screen shot). I think it’s a pretty good idea but would have liked it better if it disappeared by itself after a few seconds or if you clicked somewhere else on the GUI. Now you have to click on another control to make it disappear. If I had to complain about something I'd also say that some knobs are too small and that it’s sometimes hard to see how much they're turned.
As with other Ohmforce plug-ins you have a button in the GUI for additional settings. This is a nice little thing other plug-in developers should take note off. This is also where you find the manual...
The manual yes... It's online. It’s not a big issue for me, but especially many Pro Tools PC users have setups without any internet connection. It's really no biggie, what you have to do is download it before you use it and read it offline. Problem is, there was an error when I went to the page to read it. When I checked a few minutes ago it was up and running though.
On track
My expectations: A strange, musical, fucked up beast to distort all kinds of things with. After fooling around with it for five minutes I yelled out "SHIT!" in a room with no one but myself in.
I started with using it on a vocal track. My initial thought was to use it on a doubled vocal track and mix it in subtle with the lead vocal. I started fiddling with the settings and after a few minutes I discarded my initial thought, slapped it on the main vocal track and used it as a seriously wicked lo-fi effect on a few selected parts of the song. It just sounded so damn good!
What the hey, with a third of the vocals already drenched in ohmicidical madness, why not go for a murder mix? I plugged it on a solo guitar which to begin with had a kind of blues-like distortion, which is not very much. Of course it sounded seriously ill, but I mean this in a good way. I ended up not keeping it in this session but I could definitely see myself using this approach in another session. Just to be clear, while I’m sure you can use this and nothing more on a lined guitar, if you want traditional amp simulators or anything like that then just turn around and walk away - you won't find it here.
What else can we kill? I can see it being used on pretty much anything that needs to be destroyed. Why not go for wicked broken drum loops or crazy synth bass sounds? The sky’s the limit, and if you reach it I bet you can destroy it too with Ohmicide!
When my holocaustic tendencies had settled a bit I decided to try it with some different settings and use it with some subtle distortion instead. I was a bit surprised to hear it actually work. That might sound stupid, but up until this point I had only seen it as a brutal weapon in the hands of genocidal freaks.
Conclusion
While you can use Ohmicide: Melohman for subtle distortion it’s when you brutally murder sounds with extreme lo-fi settings that it really shines in my opinion. Oh, and the price? Unbeatable. This bad boy will have you seriously fucking up sounds in no time. Fatality. Original from protoolerblog.com