Feature Deep Dive: Multi-Mic Mixer in MNDALA 2

Hello Folks,

I’m Akanksha Kasibhatla, from the MNTRA team. This blog post is dedicated to explore the Multi-mic mixer, one of the hidden gems in MNDALA 2, which allows you to take advantage of the care and variety of options we have gotten during our recording sessions.

MNDALA 2 is our sampler engine, where our full category of instruments can be loaded. It is the tool to bring to life all of our sounds. If you haven’t used it yet, it is free to download, and we have a plethora of free instruments for you to give it a try. If you’re already a user, we hope this blog post springs some new ideas to compose and create through mixing.

What Is the Multi-Mic Mixer

The Multi-Mic Mixer is a powerful per-sampler mixing tool in MNDALA 2 that allows users to blend multiple microphone perspectives of the same sample, giving control over tone, space, and performance feel. It’s the place where each of the individual microphones or microphone pairs we recorded for the instrument are listed. You can hear them separately, combine them, and even assign them to each of the axes or a LFO.

Where to Find It

• Located within the Sampler View, directly beside the Volume knob of each individual sampler. It’s the tiny mixer icon.
• It only becomes active for instruments that were recorded with multiple microphone positions, such as close, room, vintage, and contact mics. This feature was added when we released MNDALA 2, so more than half of our instrument make use of it!

How It Works

Each sampler in MNDALA 2 can load one sample map, and if that sound was recorded with multiple mic setups, the Multi-Mic Mixer lets you:

• Adjust the level of each mic channel independently — e.g., blend more of the close mic for intimacy or dial in the room mic for spaciousness.
• Control mic levels either manually by using the volume knob or dynamically using:
  • Perform View axes (X, Y, and Z) — assign mic levels to the axes to respond in real time to your gestures.
  • AniMod system (LFOs and modulators) — create evolving spatial blends over time by modulating the tables using all kinds of wave shapes, and even syncing with DAW bpm.

Why It’s Powerful

• Expressive Control: Performers can shape the space around the sound expressively during playback — you can literally morph a sound from dry and present to lush and distant using a simple gesture. Additionally, if you’ve assigned the axes to a CC in your controller, this can be done extremely easy by moving a physical knob or slider.
  
• Cinematic Sound Design: Perfect for composers and designers seeking nuanced spatial and timbral control without jumping between tracks or plugins or automating multiple parameters. Just by using this feature, you can create multiple versions of the same sound, which could be used to transform a musical cue or excerpt in time, or can actually become an excerpt for an entirely different cue/excerpt.
  
• Real-Time Responsiveness: Because it’s integrated into MNDALA 2’s modulation system, mic blend can shift smoothly with other parameters, creating living, moving textures. If you want to perform live with our instruments, you can directly affect multiple parameters simultaneously with the macros. The multi-mic mixer is one of the coolest ones, because it’s a version of the same source, through an entirely different analog processing.

Creative Use Cases and Ideas

• Dynamic Foley Layers: Use the Z-axis to blend from far to close mics as an object/character comes closer to the camera.
• Score Texture: Automate transitions from isolated tones (close) to ambient textures (room) within a single sound event. Make your mix grow as the climax approaches by adding the room microphones.
• Live Sound Control: Assign mic blend to a MIDI controller and adjust space on the fly during performance between the sections of your song or piece (chorus, verse, solo, etc.)

Pro Tip

Want evolving mic movement? Assign a slow LFO to the mic mixer via the Matrix View. Pair it with a subtle pitch modulation and reverb tail using the Global FX tab and assigning those parameters to the same modulator. The result? You’ll have a constantly evolving cinematic pad with movement baked into its core.