Deep dives into mixing, mastering, and the creative process — written by engineers who live in sessions.
Great analog records were made on consoles where every channel added a little color. In the box, most producers do the opposite, slamming one processor on the master. Here's why the console approach sounds more natural, and how to bring it into your DAW.
Read ArticleYou recorded your guitar with two mics or your kit with a dozen, and instead of sounding bigger it sounds thin and weak. That's phase cancellation between the mics, and it's fixable with polarity, delay, and phase rotation. Here's how, with a free plugin.
Bus compression glues a mix, but it can also flatten the stereo image and pull the sides toward the center. Mid/side compression solves this by letting you compress the center and the sides independently. Here's how it works and when to use it.
The moment before a great drop is unbearable tension, and a rising filter sweep is one of the most powerful ways to create it. Here's how filter automation builds energy, why most attempts fall flat, and how to make a build that pays off.
Your DAW's meter says you never hit zero, so why does your master distort on a phone or after streaming compression? The answer is inter-sample peaks, the levels between the samples your meter cannot see. Here's how true peak works.
You want distorted drums that hit like a hammer, but every time you add drive, the cymbals turn to fizzy mush. The problem is that distortion saturates everything, including the quiet parts. A gate on the drive stage fixes it completely.
Pro vocals have big, lush delays that somehow never muddy the words. The trick is ducking, lowering the delay while the vocal sings and letting it bloom in the gaps. Here's how it works and how to do it without drawing a single automation line.
Exciter, saturator, harmonic enhancer: three words thrown around interchangeably that actually describe different processes. Understanding what each one does to your signal is the key to adding warmth, presence, and air on purpose instead of by accident.
The loudness war is over, and streaming normalization changed the rules. Crush your master too hard and the platform just turns it down, so you lose dynamics for nothing. Here's what LUFS means, how loud to actually master, and how to measure it.
Gain and trim both change level, so why do professional utility plugins give you both, at opposite ends of the chain? The answer explains a subtle mistake that quietly wrecks mixes, and it's fixable with a free plugin.
That expressive wah on a funk guitar and the auto-wah that makes a bassline breathe are two of the most recognizable sounds in music. Here's how they actually work, the difference between a wah and an envelope filter, and how to get both in the box.
Vari-mu is the compressor topology behind the most glued, cohesive records ever made. But what makes it different from a VCA or FET compressor, and why does it glue so well? Here's the circuit explained in plain language.
Every delay plugin has a feedback mode. Almost none give you a programmable repeat mode, and it's the more powerful of the two. Here's the difference between feedback and repeat delay, and why one lets you compose echoes instead of inheriting them.
How do professional mixes sound aggressive and gritty while staying clean and punchy? The answer is parallel distortion, and the reason yours has never worked is a phase problem nobody told you about. Here's how to do it right.
Your 808 shakes the room on your monitors and vanishes the second someone plays the track on a phone. It's not your speakers and not your ears. It's physics, and the fix is harmonics, not more sub. Here's how to make your low end translate everywhere.
Gain staging, trim, polarity, phase rotation, sample delay, bass mono, high-pass. Seven moves, ninety seconds a track. Skip them and you will spend six hours using EQ to solve problems that were never EQ problems. Plus a free plugin that does all seven.
A loop that repeats identically 64 times is not a record. Filter modulation (LFO, envelope follower, manual automation) is the cheapest way to make eight bars hold attention for four minutes. Eight voicings, three modes, four recipes to steal today.
Consoles never added warmth on the two-bus. They added a microscopic amount of harmonic distortion to every single channel, then summed forty of them. Here is why bus saturation cannot recreate that, and how to rebuild it in the box without mud.
Your mix sounds like a stack of stems because nothing makes the tracks share a common dynamic behaviour. Inside vari-mu tube compression, Sowter transformers, sidechain filtering, and the German engineering behind the Rockruepel COMP.TWO.
Repeats are loudest exactly when the mix is busiest, and buried exactly when they could be beautiful. That is a dynamics problem, not a delay problem. Ducking, gating, delay throws, anti-Doppler stutters, and the visual workflow that ends the guesswork.
EQ can only amplify energy that already exists in the signal. Professional records sound expensive because engineers generate the missing content: harmonics, transient energy, phase-corrected air, saturation.
Streaming platforms normalize every track to a fixed loudness target, so crushing your master costs you dynamics and buys you nothing. Here is exactly what to measure, why the loudness wars are over, and how to hit every delivery spec first time.
Target Validators are the perfect way to know if you have met your targets. Decibel has three targets
Reach the perfect dynamic range for your track using a limiter by using the Trudedyn-s as meeting point for perfect loudness
If you ask us, gain staging is the technique of consciously managing the gain of one or more tracks across the entire path of their described audio signal.
The LUFS Histogram represents your music's loudness (LUFS) and short-term dynamics (TrueDyn) over time. It is the best way to compare different parts of your songs and see how their loudness and dynamics evolve and compare to one another.
VU Meters will help you manage your recording levels and avoid overloading, distortion and help you hit your digital converters at their sweet spots by calibrating the meter's 0VU level accordingly
Download and launch Decibel Display from the App Store or Google Play Store.
Fab Dupont shows you how to set up the Decibel Daemon, a background app that will help you listen and analyze any music or audio clip and compare it to your production.
Award-winning engineer Fab Dupont shows you how to use your Decibel plugin offline analysis feature so you can figure out the LUFS profile of your music and spot at a glance what parts of your songs are the loudest/quietest!
Award-winning engineer Fab Dupont demonstrates how to use shortcuts to organize your modules like a pro.
How to use Decibel in your workflow w/ award-wining engineer Fab Dupont.
Sugar can be used as a mastering plugin that lets you handle some of the most critical aspects of the process with ease. In fact, you could call it an “almost” automatic mastering plugin.
Sugar excels as a bass enhancer. With four enhancer bands and the choice of three types of saturation, you have a lot of sonic options at your disposal for your bass enhancement.
Sugar is a great vocal enhancer, it can add that extra special something to your vocal tracks. No matter what style of music you're mixing.
Sugar is not only a powerful sonic enhancer; it's one of the best saturation plugin. Choose between 3 different flavors: Drive, Distort, and Crush.
Sugar is the easiest way to add parallel compression on your vocals, your drums, and every one of your tracks. Get instant great-sounding mixes.
