Mastering The Mix Levels

This is the mix balancing offering called Levels by Mastering The Mix. Levels helps the producer find the right elements in a mix to 'Level' it out.

We review the mixing and metering balance plugin Levels by Mastering the Mix and show how a simple plugin can make a big difference to your mix balance. We discuss why mix balance is important and explain what can go wrong if your audio mix is unbalanced while helping you find the best mix balance plugin.

Jump to:

• Introduction to Levels
• Getting Started
• Why Is Mix Balance Important?
• Standout Features with Mastering The Mix's Levels
• Presets Available
• How does Levels by Mastering The Mix make your track sound?
• Review Summary
• Where To Buy Levels

Introduction to Levels

Getting a balance in your mix is the cornerstone of any good - no - great music production. The pop of the kick needs to cut through the synth and bass however getting this type of sound takes a lot of skill.

The perk around Levels by Mastering The Mix is that there is an element of skill requirement removed from the mix balancing process, while at the same time I found it taught a few lessons along the way. The visual elements to the plugin mean that you can see what you are doing while hearing it.

For accuracy, I would recommend getting a good set of studio headphones of decent monitoring speakers to hear the meticulous detail.

Getting Started

Once installed its easy to get things underway. The best place for this plugin to be is on the master buss or mix track. While you can use it on individual tracks the best way I found to use it was adding it to the output track where all the sound events were being routed to. This way the monitoring of all frequencies would travel through the plugin and get captured in the visual output.

In your DAW its a case of dragging and dropping onto the appropriate mix track to get the plugin working. A side note, there did not seem to be a bypass option in the plugin that I could see, so I had to use the on off feature in my DAW.

Why Is Mix Balance Important?

Getting the right areas of a mix to pop out is important to allow the various elements of a track to 'breathe'. Essentially we're giving them enough space to work on the speaker. The human ear can hear from 20Hz to 20Mhz so fitting all the parts of a track in and giving each one room to be heard is why mix balance is important. No two instruments can occupy the same frequency but the y can overlap.

Scooping out enough space to fit another instrument in without it causing the mix to become 'muddy' is what the art of EQ (or equalisation) is all about. This is where tools like Levels will help you out. Levels helps identify the parts of the mix which are overlapping or conflicting and lets you visualise it.

Standout Features with Mastering The Mix's Levels

There were some epic features in Levels which I'd read about on the Mastering The Mix website which I wanted to try out first hand as soon as I got hold of the plug. These notable features include:

• Spectral Monitor Stereo Field
• LUFS Monitor
• Bass Space

Stereo Field is a visual width monitor of the sound coming through the mix. The shows the width from centre to the appropriate left and right channels and demonstrates how well LR balanced your mix is. Taking a synth such as Xfer Serum 2 and monitoring the output can demonstrate how the change in a wavetable form can affect the stereo field.

The LUFS monitor is a great utility to see what the perceived loudness of your mix is being output from the plug-in. This will give you chance to get your limiters etc to the right level before final mix processing and push that signal out of the master buss.

The Bass Space is my favourite part when using Levels. I've used this feature on so many mixes. The accuracy seems pretty good and while I don't always use the plugin to manage the bass space levels, I do use it as a guide to make sure that I'm scooping out or bumping up the right parts of my mix. I might use this in conjunction with a more preferred EQ plugin like FabFilter ProQ2 or similar.

Presets Available

On the face of it the plugin looks really simple but start playing with the different buttons and you'll delve into more screens and beyond. It was by chance I found some presets for the different mix styles. These were located in the bottom left by clicking where it says "DEFAULT". Once this is clicked, there are options for:

• Mix
• Broadcast
• Mastering
• Default

Each of which opens up further choices and offer presets for the type of mix you require. I'd suggest cycling through these and review which of the Levels settings work for your production.

How does Levels by Mastering The Mix make your track sound?

As a part of this plugin review I added Levels to the master output buss on the mix. This was then set to use the "Punchy" preset on the plugin.

You can switch between plugin enabled on and off to hear the difference. Please note due to the nature and intricacies of the detail, you may benefit using a good pair of studio headphones to hear the subtle differences.

Press the button again to start/stop the music.