 If you like the idea of easy AI assisted mastering for your tracks but you're not keen on the idea of online services where you have to pay for each release or pay for a subscription, then I've got some great news for you. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Lander is the name which everyone thinks of when they think in terms of online mastering services and many people including me have used it over the last few years and been really pleased with the results but for some people they don't like the idea of using an online service where you either have to pay for each release or pay for a subscription. So I'm so pleased to let you know that Lander have now released a plug-in version of their mastering service. It uses the same AI engine. It's got a few extra customizations which are not available on the online service and once you've bought this plug-in you can use it freely as many times as you want. You don't have to pay for each release so it's really going to be a good value for money if you release a lot of music and the great news is it's very very easy to use. Let's dive in and take a look. So the first thing that's going to happen after you insert this plug-in in your door and I recommend inserting it as the last plug-in on your master bus is that it's going to ask you to play your track so that you can use its AI engine to analyze it and then it's going to come up with a basic master for you right away. Now while it's doing that analysis I just want to take a look at an actual wave file of the mix that I've given it. You can see it here and you can see this very dynamic meaning there are some very quiet parts in it. You can see those at the beginning and then there's some louder parts in the middle and at the end. Now the important thing I want to point out here is is that I've normalized this track to 0 dB meaning that the very loudest peaks in this track are reaching 0 dB and not going over. Now if I wanted to make this louder by simply turning the volume up of this track using the master fade or something it's going to start to clip some parts of the track are going to go over 0 dB and when you get that digital clipping it's very unpleasant. It's something you really don't want and that's a major role in mastering. It's going to be using both compression and limiting to make it sound louder without actually making it clip. Now it's finished its process now and the next screen that you're faced with is the main interface. This is where all the magic happens. So let's start off by having a listen to the difference in loudness between my original track and this basic master. So I'm going to start off by playing the song with the plugin bypassed. So we're going to be hearing it at its original loudness. Then after a few seconds you'll see me flick this bypass switch here and you're going to hear the loudness difference with the basic analysis done and the basic mastering applied. Okay let's have a listen. So a massive difference there right away. Now imagine you didn't master your song at all and it's being played alongside songs which have been mastered and there's that loudness difference right away. It makes your track sound less appealing, makes it sound less professional. So it's really not something you want to do. Release a track without any mastering including some loudness improvements. Now we can also from here adjust that loudness manually just by using this loudness control over here and while you're doing that what you want to do is keep an eye this reading down here. This is the LUFS output. It's a kind of an average level if you like and many services use this measurement and they'll set some parameters or some targets you should try and reach. So if you wanted to reach those particular targets then you could just play your track adjust that loudness until you see the correct reading down there for LUFS. So just like the online lander mastering service the plugin version offers you three styles of master once it's done its analysis. You can see them in the middle here. They are warm, balanced and open. The warm style has a kind of a vintage feel to it. The balanced style has a bit more clarity and the open style is a bit more modern perhaps has a bit more punch to it. Now I'm going to play all three to you in a moment but I just want to point out a couple of things before I do. Firstly you shouldn't expect to hear massive differences between these three styles. It's kind of subtle but you will hear it better if you're wearing a decent pair of studio headphones or listening through some decent studio monitors. The next thing that I want to point out is I feel personally that as you flick between each one it actually fades from one to the other so you don't hear the difference in sound the second that you switch over. Let me know in the comments down below if you think that's happening as well. So let's start off with the warm style and then I'll go through each of the three of them. Now where the plugin differs from the online service a little bit is the level of customization you can apply once you've chosen your style. So I'll quickly go through some of the parameters down here. First of all we have an equalizer section here so we can adjust the low mids and the highs. Then we have a stereo field control so we can make our mix sound a bit wider or narrower if we want to and then we have some control. This is really to do with the vocals okay so with that frequency range where the vocal normally sits we can actually adjust the presence here yeah and then we can also apply some de-essing for that as well. Finally down the bottom in the middle we have some dynamics controls. First of all we can increase or decrease the amount of compression being used then we can change the character of the compression in terms of whether it's a soft or a hard style compression. Finally we can use saturation or we can add in some saturation. This can add some sort of subtle depth and color to the sound of our track and sometimes can make it sound just a little bit louder as well with actually increasing the loudness. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this balance style here and I'm going to customize a little bit to my particular taste as I listen to this song. Let's go. So the changes I made there were applied to the balanced style and if I switch to another style like the warm style you'll see that all of the controls have gone back to their default state. If I go back to the balanced style again then my changes have been applied. So in other words you can actually create three custom styles of your own using these controls. Now once you've done that you will want to assess which ones are better and how they compare to the original but we've got a problem at this point because the original is so much quieter it's really difficult to make that assessment. As human beings we tend to feel that things that are louder are just better okay so that sort of ruins our objectivity a little bit. So what we really want to do to make an assessment as to whether we've improved things or not is take the loudness out of the equation for the moment and that's what this control is for up here the gain match control. When we switch this on we can listen to the changes that we've made here for the customization of the style without using the loudness so it's a good thing to temporarily do. So what I'm going to do is actually play the track I'm going to switch gain match on you're going to start off by hearing the original without any of these changes being applied and then I'll flick the bypass switch and you'll be able to hear the difference between the original and the changes I've made. So I think that the changes that you can hear are actually reflected in these controls that we can see down here and they do kind of speak for themselves it was definitely a lot wider sounding there was a lot more information in the highs there was a bit more presence in the vocals and you know it's pretty straightforward really it sort of speaks for itself in terms of UI. Don't forget that at the time of release for this video if you follow the link in the description down below you're going to get 25% off of this plugin I think it's well worth it let me know in the comments down below what you think thank you so much for watching today and I'll see you in the next video