I want to take a moment to shout out a helpful - but potentially easy-to-miss - feature of literally all of our plugins. Did you know that you can click the label on any control to bypass that process? If you’re a studious manual reader, you probably did; if your approach to plugins/audio/life is more “grip it and rip it,” you might not have! Either way, hopefully I can shed some light on how this little feature can be a useful part of your workflow.

Stereo imaging is one of those aspects of mastering that contributes to the perception that mastering is some kind of “dark art.” It’s crucial - wide masters are lively and engrossing - but easy to screw up. Pushing too hard on some stereo imaging or width-enhancing plugins can hollow out a mix and mess with phase relationships, making for terrible translation, especially when mono folddown is a factor.

There’s a line of thinking among people with opinions about music production that gain staging is basically a moot concern. The reasoning goes something like this: modern DAWs use floating-point math in their internal mixers, making it really hard to clip a channel or a bus by pushing signal over 0 dBFS. Compared to overdriving a tape machine or clipping a converter, the risk of “too-hot” signal ain’t what it used to be in the days of analog recording, or even the “bronze age” of digital production.