 If you've ever found the prospect of mastering your own music confusing overwhelming and complex then I've got a great new plugin for you it's called Masterplan and it's from a new developer called Music Hack. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I get asked to review a lot of plugins and unfortunately most of the time I just don't have time. However this week I've made an exception and I'm squeezing out this extra video because I really felt that you guys should know about this new plugin which by the way I'm not being sponsored for. If you follow the link in the description down below I won't be getting any commission or anything like that. I just felt that you should know about this. Now as a bit of an overview mastering normally includes several plugins that would be you know like a limiter compressor maybe a multiband compressor EQ maybe a dynamic EQ saturation widening etc and that can be kind of complex so what this plugin gives you is a bunch of kind of one knobs if you like for each of those processes it makes it super easy especially if you're in a hurry so let's take a look. Now I have to say I wouldn't regard the mix that we're going to be working with as finished at this point so look do as I say and not as I do try to make sure that your mix is as far as you possibly can take it before you move into the mastering stage you don't want to be trying to fix a bad mix with mastering. Now one of the main things that we're concerned about during mastering is loudness and that's probably why the most prominent knob on this plugin is this loudness control in the middle here. Now loudness is important because when your song is played alongside other commercial songs you don't want it to suddenly drop in volume. We have a funny relationship with loudness things that sound louder tend to sound a bit better to us naturally yeah so that's important to get that at a good level however during the process of mastering that can be very misleading because we're kind of tricked by the loudness it makes it more difficult to judge some of the other moves we're making with say EQ or saturation etc that's why I'm so pleased to see this button here the unity button when we've engaged the unity button we're not actually going to hear that loudness okay now I'll talk about why that's very very important later on but first let me just demonstrate what happens so if I play our track and gradually turn the loudness knob up have a listen to what happens. So of course you heard it get louder when we engage the unity button you're not hearing it get louder yet except if we go to really extreme levels it won't get louder but we'll hear kind of distortion and artifacts have a listen yeah so that's really really important because we can sort of get that to where we think it should be engage the unity button and then for the rest of this process what we're going to do is have that engaged so we can hear the difference that other controls are making now one really really important thing to understand about this is to do with the metering at the bottom you can see at the bottom we've got some different metering we've got Luff's eye which is a very important value yeah this is the average loudness over time yeah and I like to measure that ultimately over the course of the whole song we've also got Luff's S which is a much shorter term average loudness value that's being measured over three seconds we've got a true peak value here which is again really important to know where our peak is often we want to set that for streaming services at sort of minus 1 dB or something like that and then finally we've got crest which is measuring the difference between Luff's and peak okay in this case the short-term Luff's and peak this just gives us an idea of the difference between our quiet parts and our louder parts so we get an idea of dynamic range now it's really important to understand that while we have this unity button engage we won't be hearing the difference in loudness but we will see a change in the metering okay that's going to show us the final outcome after we switch unity off and we'd want to switch unity off before we finally export our track super super important that you do that so now that we've got those kind of basics understood let's take a look at some of these other controls now the next few controls are really self-explanatory you don't need a tutorial for these really but we have the low and high controls these are just EQ controls and then we have this wideness knob at the top here I'm just going to play the song and quickly go through these controls and adjust them to where I think they should be I may not even adjust much at all let's just have a listen I'm pretty happy with that as a bass line now one thing about mastering is you're not always well you're often not looking for really extreme changes if I just bypass this off and on you're going to hear a subtle difference yeah but it's not going to be massive have a listen so we're just hearing especially a little bit of sparkle with that high end and a little bit more width but not drastic moves okay and that's just fine I think that creates a bass line for the other controls that we're going to look at now whilst I really love this plugin this is the first plugin from music hack and I just want to give them a little bit of feedback in case they happen to be watching love everything so far I will just mention one thing about these controls which confuse me when I was first using this if I want to set this back to zero I have to kind of or it seems to me I have to double click on it and then type zero in there as a value yeah that's fine however with most other plugins in my experience at least you can either double click on that control it may depend on the door maybe you have to hold control and double click on the control but there's usually an easy way of resetting control resetting a control just by clicking on it it would be nice if they were able to do that but yeah now the other thing is is the wideness control it's very very subtle even when you push it up to extreme levels now this will depend on the material that you're working with of course I just think that we could squeeze a little bit more out of that control guys if you're happy to be watching but at the moment it certainly gives me enough there that I was wanting for this song so let's see what everything else does one of the really good things about this plugin is the documentation which comes with it is really easy to understand yeah I like that especially as someone who's got to learn about a plugin super quick to make a review and that's also reflected in the tool tips we talked about them I think earlier but as we roll over things we can see exactly what they do and it's put in a language that most of us can understand I'm just going to quickly go through what they do and you'll see this reflecting those tool tips so we've got this thickness control here here which enables some extra saturation to the circuitry when you switch some of these controls on then you know you'll also have an extra sort of control below them yes just to blend them in we have the clean control which removes a bit of a sort of low end build up that you can get this sort of muddiness that you can get in songs sometimes so that's a useful control to have we have a multi-band compressor here just simple here not too complex we've got compression for the low mids and highs which we can you know add or reduce in there we've got this smoothness control which adds some gentle compression to the overall sound we also have this calm control which helps with harshness and we can double on that up double up on that if we want and then we've got some tape emulation here which will affect things like the way the bass behaves in different ways i'm now going to go through and just listen to my track and just quickly make adjustments to these controls and then later we'll do some sort of ab testing to see what the net result of this whole plugin is for this song so some super quick changes there i'll talk about why that's important those quick changes in a moment so just let's have a listen to this again we've got this unity button on so there's going to be no difference in the loudness but as we bypass it we can have a listen and see what's happening with all of the changes we've made here so let's start off with on and then i'll switch it off so in order for you to hear the true benefit of this plugin including the loudness and all of the other changes we made i'm now switching unity off so i'm going to play the song you're going to hear it as it originally was with no mastering and then you'll see me flick the bypass switch and you'll hear all the benefits i quickly want to explain the impulse production i will be turning this down so that i can actually play it louder if that makes sense so you're going to hear the original a little bit quieter than you heard it before i've had to do that but the idea here is that you'll be able to hear the difference between the two i hope that makes sense so let's go ahead and listen to this first of all with no mastering at all and then we'll switch it on so every other youtuber is probably going to tell you that in order to get the absolute best results for your project pay some money go to a mastering engineer and get the best results from an expert and i would say they're right okay but for many of us we're now releasing music in a very ad hoc way okay a very spontaneous way in fact and going to a mastering engineer with that expense and that time is not always convenient you may be quickly releasing a song to youtube or to sound card or what have you you definitely should still be mastering your sound on those occasions but you may not want to go to the trouble of using a mastering engineer so i think this plugin and plugins like this are a fantastic option i think they're better than the sort of online services because you still have a quite a reasonable amount of control over the sound of your master without having to dig into the weeds the real detail of mastering music and becoming an expert on that that's my opinion what do you think let me know in the comments down below now during this video i was monitoring my music with headphones but ideally i still do prefer to use studio monitors to find out which studio monitors i use and why i recommend you watch this video right here