musik hack master plan TEAM TEST: Musik Hack Master Plan

[Dave Bryce]

We've come across an interesting, easy to use affordable software tool for mastering applications.  Thought y'all might like to know about it.

 

Check it out:

 

 

The Musik Hack folks say:

 

Master Plan is a professional audio mastering workflow that gets you release-ready masters with simple controls: Crystal clear loudness, rich, analog saturation, phase-coherent imaging, physical tape emulation, and extra tools to fix and monitor your mix.

 

We think this sounds like an excellent solution for many music/content creators, so a few of us are going to put this through some paces.  I'll be joined by Craig Anderton, Mike Metlay and Carlo "Marino" Mezzanotte in poking around under the hood. 

 

You can also download a 10 day demo from their site and play along/share your impressions.

 

It looks pretty easy to use, and hovering over each of the buttons gives you a brief description of what it's about, so the learning curve is pretty easy.

 

Psyched to dive into this and hear what everybody thinks!

 

dB

[Anderton]

Checking it out now...

 

First positive impression: This is NOT a plug-in that bludgeons your sound to win the loudness wars. There are some delightfully subtle aspects to the well-chosen set of parameters. It also has a Unity mode so you can hear what it's actually doing to the audio. A lot of plug-ins don't do this, so that you'll be impressed with how LOUD and BIG the sound is. Apparently the folks behind Master Plan have sufficient confidence in their plug-in that they don't feel the need to always hype things artificially, although you can turn off unity if you want to hear what the end result will sound like.

First negative impression: The GUI uses the dark look that's all the rage these days, but I'd like more contrast and brightness so that the interface "pops" more.

 

More to come...stay tuned!

 

 

[Dave Bryce]

A little background on the folks behind this bad boy:

 

Musik Hack is the brainchild of Grammy-nominated producer and engineer Stan Greene, and composer/plug-in developer Sam Fischmann.

 

Stan has mixed records on Billboard #1 projects such as Rihanna’s “Anti”, Big Sean’s “Dark Sky Paradise”, and Wale’s “The Album About Nothing”. He’s also worked on O.T. Genasis’s multi-platinum smash hit singles “CoCo”, “Cut It”, and "Push It', Jaden Smith's multi-platinum single "Icon", and songs from Pharrell, Saweetie, and Busta Rhymes. He is a protege of Manny Marroquin, who he worked with at the renowned Larrabee Recording Studios.

 

Sam is a seasoned software developer whose portfolio spans audio/DSP, Web development, and embedded systems. He’s also a composer and longtime musician. Sam is obsessed with building creative, functional, major-label-quality products that don’t look like airplane cockpits.

 

dB

[Anderton]

The appeal of Master Plan is that it distills a Grammy-nominated engineer's experience into an easy-to-use interface. Anyone who's done a lot of mastering will find there are certain settings that you come back to time and time again. Of course, these don't apply to 100% of all material - sometimes you get questionable mixes that need surgery more than they need tweaks. But while one size may not fit all, it can often fit 95% of the time. 

 

The Clean button is a good example. The image below shows it at maximum, which puts a shallow cut centered around 200 Hz. This is a setting that removes "mud" from masters, and creates a tighter, more present sound. Although technically it's producing a cut, another perspective is that it's making the highs and low bass more prominent. (Incidentally, in the following screen shots, ignore the level variations in the low end. Pink noise is being used as the source, so it varies constantly. These variations are most noticeable at low frequencies.)

 

 

The Calm option reduces harshness. When mastering, I often use a steep notch to do much of the same thing - find one or two nasty resonances, and reduce them. However, the optimum frequency varies depending on the material, so a program like Master Plan can't include a "one-size-fits-all" steep notch. So they've done the next best thing by rolling off the extreme highs (above around 12-15 kHz) where aliasing and various artifacts like to hang out. But, there's another corrective, and very shallow, reduction in the range from 3 kHz to about 10 kHz. The upper midrange is where the ear is most sensitive (unless you haven't been careful about protecting your hearing, in which case it's one of the first areas to get damaged), so excessive frequencies in that range sound harsh. Calm subtly reduces the harshness. The screenshot shows the maximum setting, which includes turning on the 2X switch. (Note that if you use iZotope Ozone's "Stabilizer" module and look at the frequencies it chooses to reduce harshness dynamically, they're pretty much in the same region.)

 

 

The one issue with reducing signal level in this range is the music can then sound a little duller. So, I often keep the notch in place, but add some high-frequency emphasis to restore some of the brightness. This counteracts the Calm notch somewhat, but not enough to eliminate the Calm button's effectiveness. The next screenshot shows the maximum boost with the High control. You'd rarely set it to maximum, but it's there if you need it. Turning the control up just a tiny bit adds some "air" at the highest frequencies, while keeping any boost below that range low enough to avoid cancelling Calm's effect.

 

 

The next screenshot shows the maximum High cut. Interestingly, it doesn't seem exactly reciprocal to the boost. This makes sense, because when rolling off highs, you don't want to cut too much into the upper mids.

 

 

Similarly, let's look at the Low boost and cut at their maximum settings.

 

 

 

Boosting gives a gentle lift, and again, it's unlikely you'd use the maximum boost and cut. It's really more for adding fullness, or taking away excessive bass. The only aspect it doesn't address is that in small home studios, the biggest problems with untreated rooms usually happen below 150 Hz. So, you often want to attenuate that range somewhat, although that can be fraught because it's likely there are response peaks and valleys. If you reduce bass too much to get rid of excessive bass you don't want to hear, you also get rid of the bass you do want to hear. Because there's no "one-size-fits-all" room, there's no way to deal with this issue in a plug-in like Master Plan. (Maybe for version 2.0 they can include a button called "Hey Bro, You Really Need to Treat Your Room!" that moves the low control's frequency from 1 kHz down to 200 Hz or so.)

 

Finally, before getting into the subjective effects the various dynamics options offer, let's look at Wide. This is your basic imager that spreads stereo further to the left and right. This will introduce some degree of negative correlation, but for stereo it's not a problem. Summing widened stereo to mono may in theory create some thinning, but it will likely not be noticeable. You can prove this to yourself by selecting the Mono option toward the right side, where a multi-position switch emulates four listening environments and mono (more on this later). Vary the Wide control from full counterclockwise to full clockwise. I highly doubt you'll hear any issues.

 

 

So far, so good! I think the design decisions for frequencies and control ranges make sense, and correlate pretty closely with my experience.

 

My only nitpick is that I couldn't find a key modifier+click way to return a control to its default position, like the usual ctrl+click or shift+click. The current way to do this is to double-click on a control (this opens up a field where you can type in a precise numeric value). After double-clicking, hit Delete, then hit Return. It's not a big deal, but a modifier+click to return controls to defaults is faster.

 

 

 

[RABid]

Interesting. These new mastering programs just keep getting better. The thing I really notice over the last 5 to 10 years is a real improvement in perceived dynamics while battling in the loudness wars. The price is not bad and I would definitely choose the "Forever" level of purchase. The only negative for me is I already own Ozone 9 Advanced which I purchased 1 month before the release of Ozone 10. On the positive side, the forever price of Master Plan is less that what iZotope wants me to pay to upgrade Ozone.

 

Something I don't see mentioned is copy protection, how it is managed, and how many computers I can install on.

[RABid]

On 6/6/2023 at 3:14 PM, Anderton said:

First negative impression: The GUI uses the dark look that's all the rage these days, but I'd like more contrast and brightness so that the interface "pops" more.

I did notice there is a way to change the color of the plugin which makes it much easier to read.

[Anderton]

4 hours ago, RABid said:

I did notice there is a way to change the color of the plugin which makes it much easier to read.

 

How did you do that? I saw the options for LED and color cycle, but nothing for the plugin as a whole. One of the considerations for me is "If I'm using this in a seminar, will people in the back row be able to see it? I'd find brightness and contrast controls useful, like in the lower image. Also note that the size is not scalable for high-DPI monitors. I don't have a high DPI monitor so I don't know if that's an issue or not...the interface is plenty big on my 1920 x 1080 monitor.

 

[RABid]

8 hours ago, Anderton said:

How did you do that?

Check out this video, 6:00 mark.

 

 

[Anderton]

Okay, I do know about those. They can help, but it's not the same as brightness and contrast, like in the image above. I know I'm being picky, but I've been spoiled by the customizations in DAWs that let me tailor the look. It has practical ramifications, like when you're using the plugin for audio-for-video projects.

[Musik Hack Sam]

Hi everyone, this is Sam, the developer from Musik Hack, thanks for doing a deep dive on Master Plan! If you have any specific questions, let me know!

 

I hear you on the contrast issues, we'll look into that in our next art round. A couple things:

• In the settings screen, there's a button for a user manual if you'd like to read it. There are some tips there!
• To reset a control, alt+click or option+click should work.
• While I'm talking mouse here, to fine-adjust a control, hold shift (the exception is output, which moves in decibel increments when shift is held)
• To change the size of the interface, use the XS, S, M, L, XL drop down just to the left of the settings gear

I'll take note about the discoverability of these and think about a way to make them easier to find, thanks for digging in!

[Dave Bryce]

Thanks, Sam!  Welcome to MPN!

 

dB

[Anderton]

22 hours ago, Musik Hack Sam said:

Hi everyone, this is Sam, the developer from Musik Hack, thanks for doing a deep dive on Master Plan! If you have any specific questions, let me know!

 

I hear you on the contrast issues, we'll look into that in our next art round. A couple things:

• In the settings screen, there's a button for a user manual if you'd like to read it. There are some tips there!
• To reset a control, alt+click or option+click should work.
• While I'm talking mouse here, to fine-adjust a control, hold shift (the exception is output, which moves in decibel increments when shift is held)
• To change the size of the interface, use the XS, S, M, L, XL drop down just to the left of the settings gear

I'll take note about the discoverability of these and think about a way to make them easier to find, thanks for digging in!

 

Welcome aboard! Reviews are always so much more useful to the community when the developer can add unique insights and provide fact-checking. I appreciate your comments, which lead me to more comments

 

• When I clicked on the "user guide" button, no manual appeared. After seeing your comment, I went to check again. The issue was clicking on it opened a folder with a highlighted PDF manual file, which is fine except it opened on my second screen. I happened to have it turned off yesterday because nothing I was running needed it, so that's why I didn't see the manual. 
• Pilot error - I assumed that since you did the standard "hold shift" for fine tuning, you'd probably do the usual "ctrl+click" for reset on Windows. Of course, alt+click is just as good.
• I totally missed the resizing options, due to force of habit...I pulled on the corners to resize. 

 

I won't be so impatient about checking it out as I get further into this   So far, one of my favorite aspects is that Master Plan can do subtle changes. It lets you decide whether you want to use a scalpel or a sledgehammer. 

 

[allan_evett]

Fascinating read, so far! This looks like a powerful tool with a very straightforward interface.  I don't own a dedicated mastering tool, having used some of the basic mastering options offered within Logic Pro X - also using a free copy of EZmix that was included with a keyboard purchase a few years back. My 11' x 11'  bedroom studio space is not a signicant source of income, if at all over the past couple years. But I'm seeing that Master Plan could've benefitted recordings I've released.  

 

Planning to check out Master Plan over the next month once my new MacMini is set up with Logic reinstalled. Just finishing up a collaboration on a 2015 iMac that is quickly circling the drain .

[Anderton]

Time for the rubber to meet the road...

 

I'm working on a song that's getting close to finished. Personal Bias Alert: I don't like to master using processors in a multitrack's master bus -I'm old school, and treat mastering as a separate process that happens after the mix is done. However, when running off drafts, I do a "sorta master" with EQ and (usually) IK's Stealth limiter. Out of curiosity, I checked the EQ settings I'd used on this song. 

 

 

 

Well, it's clear I made the same basic judgement calls on EQ as Master Plan does with the Clean and Calm buttons. So, of course, I'm going to say their choices for those parameters were brilliant 🤣. It was actually a little spooky to see how closely they correlated. It took me years to find those frequencies, now you can just buy them

 

The next step was to adjust the Master Plan parameters to see how easy it was to have a similar sound as my EQ+Stealth rough draft. Let's start off with the totally unmastered mix. Its LUFS is around -13.

 

 

 

Here's the version done with Master Plan. I basically set the controls for the kind of sound I wanted, at least at this stage of the mix.

 

 

 

And here's the EQ+Stealth version.

 

 

 

The Master Plan version sounds a little softer, because it measured -10.1 average LUFS while the EQ+Stealth version measured -9.6 LUFS average. (I aim for -11 to -9 LUFS with most pop/rock productions.) However, note that Master Plan greatly simplifies controlling true peak - it hit -2.0 True Peak on the nose, without my having to do anything. With Stealth, you have to set the desired ceiling, and then possibly re-adjust the amount of input level. Incidentally, setting the Master Plan Loud control and Stealth Input control produced very similar results. So, maybe they both indicate how much level you're pushing into the limiter?

 

The goal of this exercise was not to say Master Plan or EQ+Stealth is "better" or "worse." Nor was this a detailed mastering job, just a rough idea to get to know Master Plan better. The takeway is I've mastered hundreds of tracks over the years, and my experience/tweaking went into setting the EQ and Stealth limiter for the sound I wanted. With Master Plan, I ended up with a very similar sound without even trying. I just tweaked some parameters, and...done. I did try to do an apples and apples comparison - I didn't use Width, Compress, or Tape on Master Plan, because I wasn't using those processors with EQ + Stealth. (Personal Bias Alert: Generally, I don't use image processor, compressors, or saturation on a master unless it's a salvage job, although I do use these processors on individual tracks. With mastering, my philosophy is that applying something like saturation applies it to every track. I'd rather apply it where needed on individual tracks, and keep the master clean.)

 

The EQ+Stealth master seemed a little girthier, but enabling Thick on Master Plan would probably make up for that difference. The main comparison I want to pursue further is high-frequency clarity. It seems that Master Plan may have an edge there, so I'll try it with music that's heavy on hand percussion and transients. 

 

I think the next exercise is to finish the song, use only Master Plan and take advantage of whatever features are appropriate to create the master, and see a) whether it sounds like what I want (I suspect it will), and b) how easy or difficult it will be to get there.

 

My bottom line so far: Master Plan can be very helpful for those who don't master with a la carte plugins, but want a solution where all the heavy lifting happens behind the interface. Granted I have my own biases, but they align with Master Plan's designers...so of course I'm going to like it

 

If your goal in mastering to have what comes out of Master Plan be better than what you put into it, then it will meet your goals without breaking a sweat. If your goal is to do a perfect custom master, Master Plan may or may not do the job. But in many cases, unless you're mastering for vinyl, it can certainly come really close. Based on my initial impressions of the high-end clarity, it may also have some advantages other options don't have.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dave Bryce]

Outstanding work, brother Craig - thank you!

 

I’ve got a track I’ve been working with on which I want to try putting Master Plan across the Master buss - I suspect it’ll be of great help to me.  Your deep dive should make using it even easier.  

 

Will post my results shortly.

 

dB

 

 

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, Dave Bryce said:

I’ve got a track I’ve been working with on which I want to try putting Master Plan across the Master buss - I suspect it’ll be of great help to me.  Your deep dive should make using it even easier.

Just remember that the parameters are well-chosen. With many of them, like the multiband compressor, you don't need to do big changes to get the desired result.

[Anderton]

The more I play with this, the more I wonder...who is this for? With all due respect to a well-designed product, I wouldn't use it because I have a selection of plugins that accomplish the same kind of tasks, as well as the need to do some things it can't do (e.g., split off the low frequencies and sum them to mono when mastering for vinyl). So I don't think it's for people who do mastering routinely.

 

I don't know if it's intended for the people who use something like LANDR, or want a solution where they don't have to know anything. Master Plan is a tool with a reasonable degree of sophistication, so you kind of need to know what you're doing to use it effectively. But using terms like "thick" or "calm" would imply wanting to appeal to a less sophisticated user. Maybe they could appeal to this kind of user more if Master Plan had a bunch of presets, so people with parameterphobia could just cycle through the presets until they hit a sound they like. 

 

So, I guess it's for people who have home studios and are fairly proficient at mixing, but don't do a lot of mastering. They can translate to Master Plan what they've learned about sound from mixing...e.g., they already know what multiband compression is. They may not know what "calm" does, but if they're decent at mixing, they've trained their ears enough so they can hear what difference that parameter makes. The price also seems to imply it's not for casual users, but it's also not out of reach compared to some other mastering solutions.

 

Maybe the developers could chime in about this...

[Dave Bryce]

2 hours ago, Anderton said:

Master Plan is a tool with a reasonable degree of sophistication, so you kind of need to know what you're doing to use it effectively.

 

Effectively is an odd word here.  At the end of the day, Master Plan is a simple enough interface that the average user should be able to rely on their ears to know if the parameters they’re trying/engaging make their work sound “better”. 

 

 

2 hours ago, Anderton said:

But using terms like "thick" or "calm" would imply wanting to appeal to a less sophisticated user.

 

Makes sense.

 

 

2 hours ago, Anderton said:

Maybe they could appeal to this kind of user more if Master Plan had a bunch of presets, so people with parameterphobia could just cycle through the presets until they hit a sound they like. 

 

 

Always a good idea with a plug-in, IMO - gives users a better idea of how the developers recommend their work be used.

 

dB

 

 

[Anderton]

6 hours ago, Dave Bryce said:

Effectively is an odd word here.  At the end of the day, Master Plan is a simple enough interface that the average user should be able to rely on their ears to know if the parameters they’re trying/engaging make their work sound “better”. 

 

Well, consider what happens if someone thinks the music is too "bright." Do you pull back the treble, engage "Calm," or add some high-frequency multiband compression? Or all of them? Or will the user even know whether these complement or supplement each other? What if they pull down the treble and it sounds less bright, so they're happy...but didn't realize that if they'd used the multiband compression, it would have been a better solution for their particular problem?

 

I think people who've been doing this for a long time forget that a lot of people just don't have finely-tuned ears. They haven't worked on mixes and masters for decades to train their ears. A good example is the "fizz" frequency in some amp sims. People generally don't think what they hear has any problems. But when you notch out the fizz frequency, then bypass the notch and they hear the fizz return, their ears have been trained to hear what the fizz sounds like. Once you've been trained to hear it, you can't unhear it. Kind of like how if you've Auto-Tuned enough vocals, you can pick out when something has been pitch-corrected, even if it's fairly subtle. 

[Dave Bryce]

17 hours ago, Anderton said:

I think people who've been doing this for a long time forget that a lot of people just don't have finely-tuned ears. They haven't worked on mixes and masters for decades to train their ears. 

 

True…but then again, there are people who haven’t been doing this for that long and aren’t professionals, yet do naturally have a good feel for what they like/what sounds good to music consumers.  

 

A buddy of mine I’ve known for a while is a talented musician who did next no no tracking/mixing in his life until COVID gave him the time to dig into it.  His early efforts sounded better than I expected, and he improved really quickly.  My guess is that he’d really like Master Plan.

 

Brings us back to your question of who the intended customer is for this product. @Musik Hack Sam?

 

dB

[RABid]

I would think the intended customer is people like me. People without training in the art of mastering and don't have confidence in their ear and want a recording to sound as good as possible without paying an expert.

[Anderton]

The most compelling feature for me is that you can have everything running at unity gain, so you get the truth about what the processing is doing. You don't get some big boost and think "Wow, that's so much better!," only to find that when you set the dry and processed to the same LUFS settings the difference is more subtle. So, you really know what you're getting, without having to do arduous A/B comparisons.

[jazzpiano88]

Question:  Is this for me?

 

I’ve got a Sony D50 recording of a live set of my band and I’m breaking it into songs.  
I don’t have mixing/mastering skills to speak of, but was considering how to spice up the wave files.  
The bass and drums are excellent as-is but would like to see if I can enhance the presence of the rest of the band a bit.  

My plan was to use compression and EQ in Logic.

 

Is this product something I could consider as a single, easier way to accomplish my goal? Potentially easier to use with my limited skills?  Or am I just going to have to learn more or hand it off to someone with experience?

 

thanks!

 

 

 

[Dave Bryce]

4 hours ago, JazzPiano88 said:

Question:  Is this for me?

 

I’ve got a Sony D50 recording of a live set of my band and I’m breaking it into songs.  
I don’t have mixing/mastering skills to speak of, but was considering how to spice up the wave files.  
The bass and drums are excellent as-is but would like to see if I can enhance the presence of the rest of the band a bit.  

My plan was to use compression and EQ in Logic.

 

Is this product something I could consider as a single, easier way to accomplish my goal? Potentially easier to use with my limited skills?  Or am I just going to have to learn more or hand it off to someone with experience?

 

Yes, you're a potential customer for this product.

 

My suggestion - download the free demo and play with it.  Ask us questions, if you'd like.  We've even got one of the developers watching this thread, so he can help.

 

You can dowload the demo here.

 

dB

 

 

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, Dave Bryce said:

Yes, you're a potential customer for this product.

 

Agreed. Compression and EQ in Logic can do a lot, but the feature of most interest to you with Master Plan is that a lot of the choices have already been optimized specifically for mastering.

 

Bear in mind that if surgical EQ is needed, you can still insert it prior to Master Plan. I recommend against using compression (personal bias alert: I almost never use compression on masters), Master Plan's dynamics processor is more relevant to mastering. 

[jazzpiano88]

Fantastic! Thanks for the suggestions!   I’ll try the demo.  

[Musik Hack Sam]

Practical stuff out of the way: there are some presets at the bottom to cycle through, right next to the size control!

 

Thanks for asking questions about who this is for. We have major label records being mastered with this every day, and testimonials from people like Mark Parfitt and Damien Lewis right on our site! People at that level use it both for the quality, and as a streamlining tool: instead of having to deal with a stack of 10 plugins, they can focus on using their ears to make adjustments with a tool that already has them in the right lanes at the right quality. Making a tool is about ergonomics in every sense. If it's hard to know what to change to get the result you want, everything takes more time. If instead, the right decisions are made ahead of time, you can focus on just the changes that you want, without having to know all details about sound manipulation, and you get a much more musical, listening-based experience instead of getting tangled in the technicals.

 

I'm getting wordy here, but I normally see these products in one of two lanes, neither which I love:

1. A one-knob or AI-based approach. No control, full trust in the machine, made exclusively for beginners or people who want "that sound"
2. An airplane cockpit that requires users to focus on getting technical about audio, rather than getting good at listening and adjusting to taste

Master plan is splitting the difference here: the vast majority of mastering decisions have evolved into a similar workflow across most genres. By focusing on that workflow and labeling the controls by what they do to the sound, rather than how they do it:

• professionals get a more musical experience
• beginners require less technical bring-up and can use their ears
• everybody gets control to bend the sound to their taste
• quality stays very high by picking the right decisions: beginners get help without boxing in experts too hard

By creating a one knob, we're not helping people develop their own taste or ears. By making a cockpit, we're not helping professionals get a musical or efficient experience. So this is where we land!

[Dr Mike Metlay]

Hi all!

 

I'm finally getting a chance to chime in here (don't ask, June has been a helluva month). Coming at things from a (slightly) different perspective than bros Dave and Craig, I've come up with the following philosophical blather.

 

First: I want to echo the sentiments that Master Plan sounds very good and produces real results without bludgeoning you over the head with them. Craig has covered a lot of the technical details already; I am particularly fond of the Unity setting, which removes the single most dangerous variable from the mastering process, namely the "louder is better" delusion. As we continue to struggle toward LUFS being the new normal, this one feature does more than any other to help us produce worthwhile results that will survive modern stream and download transcoding methods.

 

Second: I also want to get behind what Sam just said in his most recent post about the importance of a balance between oneknobbosity and cockpitude. 

 

As I see it, there are two levels to the mastering process:

 

– you do have to wrap your head around as much or as little of the science as you can in order to master (or premaster (see below)) your work effectively

– but before that, you have to wrap your head around the concept of mastering (or premastering (see below)) being something that you can do.

 

I've mentioned premastering a couple of times; often what an artist or composer wants for "mastering" is actually premastering – getting a mix in the ballpark of how they'd like it to sound, as a cheat sheet for the "real" mastering engineer. Supply the finished mixes with and without the premastering, and an A/B comparison guides the mastering engineer in the direction you'd like to take things.

 

Other artists and composers can't afford a mastering engineer; they want to upload content and don't have the time or money for a proper mastering pass, and they sure as hell don't think of mastering as anything that is within their reach!

 

This is why hands-off services like LANDR are so appealing at first glance. You drop in your track, pay your money, push the button, and ptui!, back comes your "mastered" track, nice and loud(er than you input) and ready to go. Of course, the more you learn (and the more you listen and educate your ears), the more you realize that letting a random machine do this is worse than doing nothing at all, but it might take months or years for you to absorb the technical details needed to connect a parameter's setting to your ears and heart.

 

I don't see Master Plan as "splitting the difference", especially after a quick readthrough of the User Guide (which communicates a remarkable amount of information in a very unscary way in the space of a mere 8 pages – mad respect to those guys from a professional manual writer!). I see it as a bridge from one level of expertise to the next. You're given some nice unscary knobs to turn and buttons to press, and the User Guide explains what they do... so when you get to the point where you start to want to do more, you've been taught which tools to start looking for.

 

Third: I think that both of the previous points tie into the sort of user that would benefit from Master Plan. Because it's a bridge from simplicity to complexity that goes in easy steps, and it has functions that prevent drastic misuse while still allowing you to stretch things a bit while retaining good sound quality, its ideal user IMO is someone who knows that:

 

– proper mastering is important

– improper mastering is worse than no mastering at all

– mastering can be as complex as you want to make it, but as with many other processes you get 90% of the benefit in the first 10% of your effort

...all of which leads to:

– simple, even simplistic, approaches to mastering can yield benefits, as long as the tools are good.... and I think Master Plan qualifies and then some.

 

I admire people who do a lot of mastering and approach it with a musical ear and a fine eye for technical detail. Very few of them have ever touched any of my music, because I can't afford them and in many (most) cases my music won't benefit commensurately from that level of care. However, Master Plan lets me use my limited understanding of loudness standards and finding and controlling problems in a way that won't backfire on me, and it lets me do so with more confidence than I'd have with just using LANDR or some other GIGO system.

 

It's early days yet, but I think that Master Plan is likely to be a go-to mastering/premastering tool for me simply because it hits my technical sweet spot and does its job without harming anything. I need more of that in my musical life, and I applaud Sam's team at Musik Hack for a very worthwhile piece of software. Well done, sirs!

 

TL;DR – just go get the demo and futz around with the plug-in on some completed mixes, preferably with the User Guide open on another monitor, preferably a monitor that's turned on (sorry, Craig, had to go there). You'll arrive at your own conclusions pretty quickly.

 

I'd like to conclude with a few images of the plug-in interface, to address a couple of queries/complaints that were made earlier and not resolved (at least not that I could see, and certainly not with graphics).

 

First off: Craig, the plug-in has a setting called Faceplate. You've been working with the Black setting this whole time, or so it seems; the White setting looks like this:

 

I find this way easier to read and work with than the alternative! My only graphics complaint is that the Filters slider should have a larger position indicator with a very bright central dot; as it is now, you can barely see where it's set.

 

Someone wished for presets? Master Plan comes preloaded with 25 of them, although admittedly 20 of those are "make it loud and to heck with modern standards" vs. "let's work within LUFS so the music is less in your face but more dynamic-yet-controlled" versions of 10 basic sounds. They are available in pop-up menus/submenus and there's a place to save and access your own. See below:

 

 

And finally, for those of you who haven't downloaded the demo yet, this is what the Settings screen (accessed by clicking on the gear icon) actually looks like. Note that when you come up with settings you like, you can save them as the default for the plug-in.

 

 

I will continue to mess with Master Plan as I integrate it into my workflow, and if I make any more drastic good or bad discoveries, I'll let you all know. Thanks for reading.

 

mike

 

 

 

 

[Musik Hack Sam]

@Dr Mike Metlay thanks for your deep dive and the recommendation! The legibility issues, especially with the darker faceplate, have been noted, and we're working on what to do about those.

 

I appreciate your comments on the user manual: I spent a few years in my early career as a (very) technical writer, and my mother before me was a (very) technical writer. I owe my thanks to her for the mindset and ability!

[Anderton]

6 hours ago, Musik Hack Sam said:

Practical stuff out of the way: there are some presets at the bottom to cycle through, right next to the size control!

 

Understood, but I was talking about addressing "a less sophisticated user" by including "a bunch of presets, so people with parameterphobia could just cycle through the presets until they hit a sound they like." Realisitically Master Plan has 10 mastering presets (with the output control trimmed to generate the True Peak ones), and two FX presets. Something like IK's Lurssen Mastering Console, which is less flexible than Master Plan, seems designed for people with parameterphobia - it has 40 presets organized by musical genre. While we can certainly debate how relevant the presets are to the genres they represent, if Master Plan had something like this, it would provide the needed "training wheels" for people to get started, or to reverse-engineer the presets. 30 - 50 categorized presets seems about right to have a solid bunch of choices, without totally overwhelming new users. A preset for EDM is going to be very different than a preset for Metal or Pop, so you would at least point users in the right direction.

 

Ozone and Waves are kings of the "cycle through presets with the left and right arrow keys" philosophy. This makes it super-easy to audition presets. Both companies stress out-of-the-box presets in their marketing, so it's a design goal to make those presets as accessible as possible.

 

I still believe that if Master Plan had a bunch of presets a la Lurssen and could cycle through them quickly a la Ozone and Waves, you could extend the product's reach to "a less sophisticated user." More sales, right? 😄