News of a plugin this smart may rightly shake the mastering community; but LANDR’s latest is nothing to be feared, says Stuart Adams
AI is sticking its nose further and further into the world of music production, the latest trend being AI-driven mastering tools that seek to replace the highly specialised skills of mastering engineers.
The majority of these tools are offered as online-only subscription or pay-as-you-go services, but LANDR has wrapped its own online mastering AI into a one-time-purchase plugin that runs in your DAW.
Hands-on AI
The thing that sets LANDR Mastering Plugin apart from the various online services we’ve tried (including LANDR’s own service) is that the plugin’s AI-generated results are just a baseline the user can then hone to their own specific taste.
Alongside its three mastering styles (see boxout), the plugin offers a good selection of familiar mastering controls. This starts with a three band Equalizer section that gives broad- brushed control over the low, middle and high frequency ranges. Upper-mid frequencies can be further modified with a separate Presence control, whilst a single De-Esser is provided to deal with any nasty sibilances. The 3kHz to 12kHz range of the de-esser is typical, but mastering engineers will at times use a de-esser as a means of taming resonances at lower and higher frequencies than this, something that isn’t possible with LANDR Mastering Plugin.
The plugin’s AI-generated results are just a baseline the user can then hone to their own specific taste
The stereo field can be widened or narrowed, and the dynamic character of the mastering can be tuned using Compression, Character and Saturation controls. It’s possible to hear, when adjusting these controls, that there’s more going on than just an adjustment to a compression threshold or ratio, with the impact being different across the frequency spectrum – this demonstrates a well-detailed underlying compression model.
Missing tools
All of these controls are very welcome, and allow a lot of human input into the AI-generated sound, but there are some surprising omissions from the tools on offer…
Mastering engineers often have to deal with overdone very low and very high ends in a mix – ie, those frequency ranges that are only revealed accurately by expensive monitoring systems. The tools for dealing with this are low- and highcut filters, but LANDR Mastering Plugin does not expose such filters, and nor does it appear to be applying such filtering under the hood.
Of equal importance is control over true peak signal levels. The plugin keeps these below 0dB-FS, of course, but there’s no way to set a target peak level. In contrast, many mastering engineers leave around 1
