Mastering Plug-ins

[Whatmysay]

Any suggestion for Mastering Plug-ins for Logic Express - or if you think I need them?

I just read a SonS review of iZotope Ozone 4 sounds good, but I know 'jack'. That's about the top of my price limit as well.

Either individual components (Dynamics, Imaging, EQ, Reverb, Loudness?) or as a bundled system.

Any guidance would be appreciated

Cheers

Burt

PS any channel compression plugin suggestions

[gecko zzed]

My understanding is that Logic Express comes with its own suite of plug-ins which, by all acounts, are fairly respectable. I can't say for sure, because I use a pre-Mac version of Logic. However, its plug-ins were good general purpose tools, and I am led to believe the more recent plug-ins are considerably better.

You asked about 'mastering plug-ins'. My general thought is that anything you can do to a channel you can also do to an output bus. Which means you can use a Logic reverb, say, on a particular track, but if you wanted, you could also apply this globally to the output. In that sense, you don't need mastering plug-ins as such; any plug-in can be used for this purpose.

Are you considering mastering within Logic? There are two ways of doing this.

1 By applying global effects as you are bouncing down.

2 By loading a bounced stereo track in to Logic and treating it as if it were a track as part of a song.

The advantage of (2) is that you can loaded half a dozen bounced tracks into logic, and solo from one to the other as you play so that you get a good comparison of overall levels and general sound.

[Mr. Antrobus]

Voxengo Elephant is a terrific limiting and loudness maximization plug that lists for 89.95.

Voxengo plugs are written by this Russian coder who focused mainly on PC's until recently, he's porting a lot of his stuff to OSX. His convolution reverb, pristine space, is great--but hasn't made it to OSX yet.

[Whatmysay]

Cheers looks interesting

[baker_]

I got by using Logic's built in suite of plug-ins for quite some time. I recently upgraded to T-racks 3 and Sonalksis' mastering plug-in suite. I use T-rack's EQ and the rest of the Sonalksis' plugins for the rest. Logic's Sub-bass plug is really handy, as well as the EQ Matching plug in.

What type of music are you looking to master?

EDIT (Addition): I do not consider myself a Mastering engineer. I firmly believe "leave it to the pros." These tools will hopefully help you understand and get started.

[Whatmysay]

Yes the T-rack look very good. Cheers

I guess my music is adult pop or light alternative

You can listen here if you are interested. I know different genres demand different tools - but I would not like to just limit myself by buying limited plug-ins.

Yes mastering is definitely a 'dark art' I too just want to get to grips with it as much as it will improve my sound and provide continuity for the tracks I want to produce for my album.

[hakim]

Originally Posted by baker_

I got by using Logic's built in suite of plug-ins for quite some time. I recently upgraded to T-racks 3 and Sonalksis' mastering plug-in suite. I use T-rack's EQ and the rest of the Sonalksis' plugins for the rest.

I use the same plugs, the very same way. I wish I had control over the RNC's speed of gain reduction, its a fairly hard-knee compressor. I would like to use it for light upward stereo compression. But I will have to stick with the Sonalksis SV-315 for upward compression.

[tojo]

Logic's plugins are extremely powerful, even in logic express. I highly suggest you read the plugin manual before you go out and blow a bunch of money on some waves gold platinum, (insert type of gem/rock) bundle

I would see if you can make do with what you already have (i have logic express and it seems fine)

I don't really have much experience with multiband compressors, and I think that's the only big effect (other than delay designer and space designer) that logic express is missing.

[R!ck]

In my experience with Izotope plug-ins I haven't been particularly impressed, this is a fairly ambiguous statement but they seemed to flatten out a bit of the warmth of my tracks but I couldn't narrow it down to any specific frequencies that were being detracted from the use of the plug-in. All plug-ins do this to a certain degree but I found this to be causing quite some detriment to the tracks without contributing a great deal. Having said that I didn't have all that much time to play around with it, so it could be something a missed. My advice would be to get as many free demo versions as possible, and maybe have a listen for that, maybe its just my ears.

Ps. Contrary to fairly popular belief, I actually quite like some of the plug-ins in Logic express, although they don't accurately represent the products they're based on its still very possible to produce some good sounds with out all that much tweaking.

Good luck with it man.

[qrs]

I just recently purchased ozone4 and t-racks and they are both awesome. I couldn't decide what mastering program to get, so I got both.
Either one....you won't be dissappointed. They eat up CPU power like crazy though....especially t-racks. But I don't think they were meant to be used as a plugins.
Anyways, I highly recommend both.

[Muyukiguki]

+1 for T-racks 3
and
+1 For Ozone 4

I use them both for different genres. Ozone sounds good on acoustic stuff or rap/ hip hop, while T-Racks sounds great on rock.

[wolton]

Cool site, i will come back here, regards