This Plug-in Changed My Life: Blue Cat Audio MB-7 Mixer 2

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1. Vst Hosting

I’d say about 75% of my use with this plug-in is through VST hosting. Now that number could go down as I find more uses for it but like anything else, the more you use it the more you get to know it. I feel like I have just scratched the surface.

This is really the first viable and stable option for hosting VST’s in Pro Tools, in my opinion. I’ve tried a couple options before but there was always some type of plug-in that made my DAW crash. This one truly is stable, I can’t even think of a time where my DAW has crashed yet.

The MB-7 Mixer is not perfect, however. I do find that with some plug-ins the CPU hit can be pretty hard and I think it’s a combination between the plug-in and between the VSTs themselves. That said certain plug-ins like the Variety of Sound Freebies handle the CPU load very well.

2. AudioSuite Support

If you are using bundles and plug-ins like the Waves Stuff, you know that it has what’s called AudioSuite.  I don’t know the exact science behind it but it basically puts all of it’s plugins into one .dll file.

Since the version 2.03 update, Blue Cat added the ability to support the AudioSuite plugins.  This is really cool since it’s nice to be able to access ALL of my VST’s now when working inside this plugin.

3. M/S Processing

When you buy the MB-7 Mixer you get 3 instances of it: Mono, Stereo and Dual Mono.  Now with the Dual Mono portion of the MB-7 Mixer you can do some pretty clever M/S processing if you choose to do so.   Remember that M/S processing plug-ins are completely separate tools on their own and a lot of standard plug-ins still don’t have M/S capabilities.  This gives you those capabilities and a heck of a lot more.

Let me give you an example, imagine this:

You have a stereo set of strings and you put an instance of this plugin on the insert of it’s channel.  Now you load 2 bands and set the crossover point at 300Hz.  You collapse everything under 300 Hz to mono and then you widen the stereo field on everything above 300 Hz.  And just to add a kicker you throw some saturation to the band that’s set to 300Hz and above.  Now that’s cool!

4. Customized Multi-Band Compression

Now this is crazy.  When I first got the Waves L1 Limiter I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be able to have a multi-band compressor using the L1 algorithms for my compression on each band.  How amazing is that?  That’s literally just the beginning of it too.

You can choose anywhere from 1 Band all the way up to 7 bands and you aren’t limited to what you can do on each band.  Maybe you want a completely different compressor on each band because each compressor reacts and sounds different so you need 5 different flavours for 5 different bands.  Maybe you need two compressor on 2 bands and 1 compressor on 3 bands, no problem.  Sky is the limit; go crazy!

5. Independent Frequency Panning

Another cool feature of the MB-7 Mixer is that you can take a stereo track and pan it’s frequency ranges.  This is something that wasn’t possible before, at least to my knowledge.

You can create a stereo delay and pan 0-200Hz in the center, 200-600Hz to the left, 600-1200 Hz to the right and so on – I think you get the idea.  I mean it doesn’t even stop there, you could compress each band that’s panned and even add effects to it as well – Way Cool!

6. Create Your Custom Effects

This is the one that excites me the most because there are 2 things that I think separates every mixer – the tone of their records and the effects they use.  That really is our way to create a sound that separates us from one another.  The MB-7 Mixer can get you to a place that will even separate you farther from everyone else.

We have a lot of chose for effects now a days but nothing that really allows you to go and create something that you can call your own.  With the MB-7 Mixer you can do exactly that and I will give you one example now.

Let’s say you want to create a reverb that sounds different from what’s out there now, it’s totally do-able but it is going to require some use of existing reverbs.

You could set the MB-7 Mixer up into 3 bands (or more if you want) and then select a completely different reverb for each band.  You can choose different spaces, or you can choose very similar spaces, it doesn’t matter.  Now you can pan the lowest band to the center and then pan the other two bands left and right.   That’s it you created you’r own reverb that now takes up the entire frequency spectrum and sound stage.