Harrison MPC Channel Strip

Harrison’s console‑derived channel strip plug‑in majors on speed and immediacy.

The channel strip as we know it was arguably invented by Solid State Logic, who added dynamics processing to the EQ that was already ubiquitous on mixing console input channels. The digital revolution took things to a new level, and even modestly priced live‑sound mixers these days have per‑channel compression, expansion/gating, de‑essing and so on in addition to comprehensive EQ. Many software recording packages likewise have extensive processing built into every channel in their virtual mixer, and if they don’t, it’s probably included as an optional plug‑in. So is it worth adding a third‑party channel strip plug‑in to your DAW’s built‑in resources? And if so, should that plug‑in be Harrison’s new MPC Channel Strip?

It’s certainly a plug‑in with pedigree. Harrison’s MPC consoles are super high‑end digital powerhouses targeted at the world of film dubbing, expandable to gazillions of channels and with enough DSP to compute the answer to life, the universe and everything. Every aspect of the feature set, including the channel processing, has been finely tuned through years of feedback from professional users. They are tools designed to do their job as quickly and efficiently as possible, whilst remaining sonically neutral — and now their core processing has been spun out as a plug‑in.

Strip Mining

Authorised using the iLok system and available for all major native formats, the Harrison MPC Channel Strip plug‑in has five basic processing elements. The bulk of the screen real estate is taken up by the equaliser, each of whose eight bands can have shelving, filter, bell, notch or ‘search’ responses. There’s also a separate, dedicated filter section, which features two additional bands that can have either shelving, filter or notch shapes. In the lower half of the window, you’ll find three separate dynamics processors: a compressor, a de‑esser, and a “de‑noiser”, which is actually a frequency‑conscious expander.

Eight EQ bands will usually be more than enough for both filtering and shelf/parametric tasks, but the additional pair of filter/shelf bands is nevertheless useful, not only because they have a wider choice of filter slopes but because the order of MPC Channel Strip’s processing elements can be freely varied. You could, for instance, have the main EQ set post‑compressor, but use the filter section before the dynamics. However, I was a bit surprised to find that there’s no option to switch the filter section into the compressor side‑chain, or use an external key input to trigger the dynamics.

Other than that, the compressor is certainly well specified. The ratio is continuously variable from 1.1:1 up to 100:1, and the knee and time‑constant controls are equally flexible, with a programme‑dependent auto setting available for the latter. A Depth control serves to limit the maximum gain reduction that can be applied: a very useful feature that should be implemented on more compressors! Threshold and make‑up gain are set using sliders rather than dials, and between them is a gain‑reduction meter. Unfortunately this has a fixed scale of 60dB, which means there’s not a whole lot of meter action going on in normal use. (Side‑chain filtering, an external key input and scalable gain‑reduction metering are already available in Harrison’s MPC Compressor plug‑in, and the developers are working to add them here too.)

Sibil Engineering

Harrison’s de‑esser is one of the highlights of this plug‑in, being distinctive, highly effective and a breeze to set up. It’s essentially a highly optimised two‑band dynamic EQ, the idea being that you can target the middle band towards the most problematic sibilant frequencies and use the high band to apply more gentle treatment at the very top end. But you don’t have to use it like that, and in fact it has applications that go well beyond de‑essing. The mid band can operate right down to 200Hz, and the high band down to 2kHz, so there’s plenty of scope for midrange tone‑shaping on sources other than vocals. Again, there’s a useful choice of real‑time analyser modes, and you also have control over the attack time, but what stands out most of all is its ease of use. The control set just does exactly what you need, in a supremely intuitive way, with no superfluous parameters or information.

Like several other aspects of the plug‑in, the “de‑noiser” is said to be optimised for vocal use. The principle is easily understood: as the signal level falls below the threshold, attenuation is applied at either end of the frequency spectrum, hopefully minimising any background hum or hiss in a relatively natural way. There’s no user adjustment of the time constants, the ratio, or the turnover frequency or shape of these bands: just sliders that set the threshold and the degree of low and high attenuation. But once again, what looks almost too simple on paper is highly effective in practice. Given enough time, I think most of us would turn first to advanced offline noise‑reduction tools such as CEDAR and RX, but this produces instant results and, provided you’re conservative with the settings, does minimal damage to the wanted audio. Once again, though, I found the metering problematic; especially on non‑vocal sources, you can sometimes hear that the de‑noiser is acting even when the meter suggests it isn’t.

While I’m complaining about metering, it’s also worth pointing out that there are no input and output level meters, nor any indication of overloads within the plug‑in. Get too happy with the output Trim or the compressor make‑up gain and you can certainly hear distortion, but nothing appears on screen to tell you that anything is amiss.

The sound is very clean and the feature set decent enough, but it’s the user interface that stands out.

Smooth Moves

If this description has left you thinking “That’s all very well, but look at the price! How can Harrison justify charging more than my DAW cost for a channel‑strip plug‑in?” it’s a fair question, although it should be noted that it will be available at a much lower cost during sale periods. The appeal to those who already work on MPC consoles and want to be able to use the same tools and techniques natively is obvious. For the rest of us, the answer is mainly to do with ease of use. The sound is very clean and the feature set decent enough, but it’s the user interface that stands out for its wealth of neat ideas and time‑saving details. For example, you can use the mouse to pick up nodes in the graphical EQ display and move them around, with the scroll wheel adjusting bandwidth, as you’d expect. But each node also has a numeric display below, and moving the mouse pointer over one of the numeric fields and twirling the scroll wheel provides a very efficient way of fine‑tuning your settings. The pop‑up that sets the shape of each band can also be short‑circuited by scrolling, which is handy, because it allows you to drop in and out of ‘search’ mode pretty much instantly. Setting a band to search mode essentially turns it into a band‑pass filter, which you can sweep up and down in order to pinpoint that troublesome snare ring or vocal resonance. Once you’ve located the problem area, another brief twirl of the scroll wheel will set that band to notch or bell mode in order to dispense the right treatment. Equally thoughtful is the real‑time analyser display that can optionally be set to appear behind the EQ curve. This offers four different modes, including the very intuitive ‘lightning’ option, essentially a spectrogram where peaks are outlined in a brighter white.

Auto Solo is a clever and effective tool for helping to pinpoint the frequencies to which the de‑esser should be targeted.

Similar ergonomic design features are apparent throughout the plug‑in. The ear icon next to each processing section temporarily disables all the other sections, so you can hear what it’s doing in isolation, whilst the eye‑like symbol that appears at the top right of the plug‑in interface is a momentary bypass, disabling the plug‑in only while you hold down the mouse button. The de‑esser has a clever Auto Solo function, which as the name suggests, solos whichever de‑esser band you’re dragging around at a given moment, then switches itself off when you let go. This makes it supremely easy to find and target the problematic sibilant frequencies in a vocal. And although it isn’t possible to save presets separately for each individual section, circular arrows allow the settings to be switched back to the default at a single click.

So, although many of us already have very capable channel strip plug‑ins bundled with our DAWs, it would be a mistake to dismiss MPC Channel Strip for that reason alone. I certainly found it more intuitive and faster to use than the free Avid Channel Strip plug‑in you get with Pro Tools, for example, and I suspect the same would go for the equivalents in other DAWs. It’s a big investment, but they say time is money — and, especially if you do a lot of work with vocal recordings, the ergonomic design of this plug‑in could well save you enough time to recoup that investment.