Citizens of the Rack Federation!
The MindMeld team may have been quiet of late but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy… In fact we’ve been squirreled away in our secret research lab developing more sonic weaponry for your aural arsenal.
Musicians using DAWs like Live and Cubase etc, and those using hardware studio mixers, regularly use EQ on tracks to clean up their mix by cutting some unwanted or unnecessary frequencies and giving a boost to others. In the modular world however, EQ seems to be used a lot less - perhaps because it is considered difficult, time-consuming and/or expensive (in terms of either money or CPU resources) to patch in on every track.
Since the release of MixMaster (which used adapted Borg technology to assimilate itself into many of your patches), the most common question/request we have had is whether we had any plans for an EQ. Well we certainly did… and we are delighted to announce that they have now materialised.
Introducing EqMaster – a 24 track, stereo, 4 band parametric EQ and spectrum analyser. Our aim with EqMaster was to make EQing in VCV Rack as practical and straightforward as it is in any other DAW. A single instance of EqMaster allows separate EQ control of each of the 16 tracks, 4 group busses and 4 aux returns on MixMaster (or the 8 tracks, 2 groups and 4 aux busses on MixMaster Jr).
EqMaster can be placed anywhere in the patch and uses polyphonic cables to connect to the inserts on MixMaster mixers. Track names and colours can be pulled from any MixMaster in the patch (via the right-click menu in EqMaster) and will then update automatically if they are changed in the mixer.
EqMaster has a CV expander module called EqSpander. The 2 poly jacks at the top of EqSpander allow CV control of the EQ state (active/bypass) of the 16 tracks (channels 1-16 of the left jack) and 4 groups / 4 aux returns (channels 1-8 of the right jack). Channel 9 of the right jack controls the state of the global bypass which bypasses the EQ on all tracks.
The 24 poly jacks below allow CV control of each of the 4 parameters (State, Freq, Gain, Q) of each of the 4 bands (LF, LMF, HMF, HF) of each of the 24 tracks. That’s 409 separate CV controls in total – which probably makes EqMaster the most CVable module in the entire Rack universe!
EqMaster and EqSpander are both FREE and Open Source (although donations are always appreciated 
- https://www.paypal.me/mindmeldmodular). A Beta release of version 1.1.5 of the MindMeldModular plugin which includes EqMaster and EqSpander is now available for download from our GitHub repository…
https://github.com/MarcBoule/MindMeldModular/releases/tag/v1.1.4b
If all goes well it should be beamed over to the Plugin Library soon. This version also includes a new feature for the mixers - a stereo width control (stereo tracks only) - which can be found in the track menus.
We have loved seeing all the patches and videos that have been posted which use MixMaster and can’t wait to see what you do with EqMaster.
Huge thanks as ever to our council of advisers and testers - Latif Fital, Artem Leonov, Omri Cohen, and Espen Storø. Live long and prosper friends!