Mela 3 — Synth, FX & MIDI 4+

Mela 3 is compact, solid, discrete FX give possibilities.

I had Mela 2 and although in Mela 2 it’s billed as an ‘upgrade’, your Mela 2 does not disappear, it’s just Mela 3 appears as a separate synth. The FX warrant a special mention - I lost a ‘dual delay’ from the appstore recently (not the common meaning of ‘stereo delay’ but two in series), and it’s kind of useful to have an identical set of effects, you can shove into an AUv3 FX slot in eg GarageBand, outside of the synth itself. In short - a delay of say 1/4 on the actual synth can be set up, then a delay of say 1/2d on the ‘FX’ slot, giving rise to a long, slowly damping echo/delay into the distance. Mela 3’s FX like delay are in fact, stereo anyway, so you can have TWO stereo delays, in series, allowing permutations.

The same can be done with the other effects, so ‘doubling-up’ of FX in series, can be accomplished. This is a great feature to explore, this ‘carving out’ of the FX unit from the synth, so it can sit as a separate AU to use either on Mela 3 itself (or Mela 2 of course!), or ANY other synth or track.

This seems like great value. If the sound needs beefed-up, add some saturator effect, or similar, even a guitar distortion effect, the usual trick for enhancing keyboards is to add flanger/chorus/saturation not necessarily in that order, ‘to taste’ as it were.

Dodgy/fragile/fickle Audio Units are thankfully becoming more rare, and in this regard Mela 3 is very good. It loads and plays, without glitches or drama and that was true on my older iPad Pro 2 as well as my ‘new’ iPad Pro M1 (bought used is great value - keep making new stuff please Apple, I need the cast-off gear).

This is probably a little understated this synth, and although it does not produce lush complex tones ‘out of the box’ it’s actually only possible to have a limited amount of those in a song before it sounds like mush anyway, so Mela is good for those ‘cutting’ synth sounds, and more pure sine waves. But, I’ve only done limited use with it to date. More is possible, and the M1 slowly leaking out into the used-gear market, is going to help democratise music.

For those not in a position to grab their slice of Apple silicon quite yet, Mela 2 or 3 is a good low-overhead way to let the less capable hardware like an iphone or intel-based iPad, drive several tracks with this compact synth, letting multiple layers of synth/sequencer/arpeggio come forth without over-taxing the device capabilities.

Then later, when you upgrade, you can try swapping out some of the tracks in songs created with Mela 3, and introduce more lush or complex tones as and when budget allows. But, just to reiterate, Mela can be made more complex by adding FX into the chain in Apple’s baby GB, or Cubasis 2 or 3, etc. And of course, Mela also runs standalone, so the FX built-in, is very useful, if you don’t want to run a DAW session every time to try out melody ideas, or making your own sound patches. To that end, there’s a neat window view of the ‘waveform’ and the user can make adjustments graphically for Attack etc.

I have a soft spot for Mela because it works, it’s got the FX built-in and a separate (identical) FX unit, and it’s very compact and not too CPU-intensive (or DSP intensive). It’s standalone and Audio Unit v3, and the new amber colour scheme is more mellow on the eye as well (is that just cos my ‘night-time’ setting is on?!). The economical use of device resources enables anyone to explore even quite complex multi-track sequencer runs.

If I had a grumble, it’s a very ‘generic’ grumble, not peculiar to Mela 3, that not everything that can be done, is ‘baked-in’ when recording in for example, GarageBand, with the Audio Unit. Typically, for a lot of synths, any ‘clever’ features like an x-y pad effect, do not end up in the finished recorded track ie not automated.

This common aspect that many more expensive AUs have too, shouldn’t detract from any synth in particular - it’s going to arrive, in time. In summary : Mela is compact; solid; CPU/DSP-efficient; has a built-in and ‘detachable’ FX module deployable on ANY track/instrument in the DAW; and it’s not a fortune either. Understated really - if Mela 3 occupied a piece of hardware, it’d have a pretty big fascia, because one small section (eg ‘flanger effect’) actually when tapped, displays an entire module just for itself.