Master Plan $175
Adopting a one-stop shop solution for mastering, Musik Hack present their new cunning Master Plan. Did the results impress Dave Gale?
Mastering can be a complicated business, especially for anyone working within the confines of their home studio, so having all of your mastering tools available in a single plugin has to be enticing? Music Hack’s latest plugin hopes to provide just that. Its stated aim is to reside on the backend of your DAW’s output, soaking up a number of mastering processes in a single instance. All the mastering components are presented in a simple format, which could change the way that you approach mastering in the DAW.
Musik Hack encourages you to remove any additional plugins from the master bus, before activating Master Plan. Once you load the plugin, it is pretty easy to see why that is; in spite of its relatively small and petite working area, there is a surprisingly large amount of content to call upon, to make radical improvements to your track.
Don’t mention the war
You can’t miss the large pot, which is located centrally, adorning the legend Loud. Interestingly, Musik Hack states, “We do not endorse Loudness Wars… But you will win!”. It’s effectively a Limiter, which is designed to maximise loudness, while maintaining clarity at all times. In use, the elevated results are obvious, although it is easy to push things to distortion. Guidance is offered on the best way to approach the use of the limiter, and upon refinement, works incredibly well. There’s also association with other favoured mastering tools that really bring the punch.
In the upper-most corners of the plugin, pots control signal input and post-plugin output. The input level plays a pretty significant role in the Loud function’s behaviour. To the middle-left of the plugin, Low and High pots subtly control tone, which also play their part on the outputted signal, from the limiter circuit. While the temptation would be to drive the plugin to a frenzy, lower levels of engagement do sound incredibly musical.
Completing the pot lineup, a Wide control induces stereo depth; this feels quite subtle, but through a process of A/B audition, you can hear the improvement very clearly. It’s not overtly obvious from the fascia, but clicking the legend below each pot will defeat the effect, making it easy to A/B the effected signal.
At the backend of a DAW’s output, it soaks up a number of mastering processes in a single instance
Keep calm and saturate
Along the bottom of the plugin window are a host of attractive elements. It’d be well worth your while to audition these in isolation, as they all have much to offer. As an example, the Thick button induces an analogue-inspired saturation, while the Clean and
