If you’ve read some of my past posts, you’ll know I’m not one to recommend you buy plugins to fix something that takes deliberate practice. The caveat is that if those plugins help you in your practice of mixing and mastering then they are definitely worth getting. If they help to give you real feedback that you can learn and develop your ear with then I’m all for it.
Melda Productions MCompare
I’ve had this plugin for a number of years now and it’s really allowed me to hone my mixes. Like anything Melda Productions does, this plugin is feature rich. Some of my favourite features:
- Monitoring sources which allows you to place a source instance of the plugin at any point in the chain and compare them. I’ll use it when mastering at the raw file and the end of the chain and then level match them to see if what I’m doing is actually an improvement on the original mix.
- The auto sync function allows you to sync reference or previous mixes to the current mix. If you’re doing some mix or mastering adjustments for a client, this is invaluable. You can flip between versions to get a much better sense of what the changes you’re making are doing not only to the elements you’re focussing on but the rest of the mix.
Melda Productions MCompare is definitely worth your money and your time. (If you use this code you can get 20 Euros off your purchase: MELDA4978598)
Sonible True Balance
This is a new plugin for me but I’ve taken to it like a duck to proverbial water. Far from being a spectral analysis tool, this is an adaptive analysis tool to help you identify problem areas in the frequency shape of your mix. Within seconds you can load up a rock mix profile and see if the bass needs some taming, the mids need a push or those highs are a little too hot.
Some things I love about this plugin:
- Loading in your own reference tracks: This is great for genre specific mixes or trying to achieve a similar frequency fingerprint to songs you’re referencing.
- Mono compatibility: this is really important and this makes the process so efficient. I’ve been working on mixes recently where I thought I’d mono’d out the sub-bass sufficiently and this virtual mix assistance has tapped me on the shoulder to suggest otherwise.
True Balance helps to stop your ears being fooled as well as giving you a helping hand in less than ideal monitoring set ups. I recently mastered a whole album that was less than ideally mixed just using true balance as a guide. When I pulled up some reference mixes in MCompare I was surprised at how close they were to my commercial references in the genre.
The Takeaway: Both of these plugins have taught me to mix and master better. They have also made my process more efficient and therefore more creative. This means they are worth FAR more to your projects and career than another vintage compressor emulation (or maybe even the real deal). You know what to do next.
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