It contains 5 separate processes arranged in modules. The TG Mastering Chain is a modular mastering plugin modeled after the EMI TG12410 Transfer Console that has been in use at Abbey Road for nearly 50 years. The rooms and sound of the equipment have become legendary and now much of that fabled recording environment has been captured in the Abbey Road collection of plugins from Waves.Īll the plugins in the collection are awesome to have all over your mix but there’s one, in particular, that will give you the same mastering tools that were used on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Radiohead’s OK Computer and Ed Sheeran’s + and that’s the TG Mastering Chain. It’s the place where the Beatles and George Martin produced their best work. Abbey Road studios is probably the most famous studio in the world. The name itself is bound to trigger a few notes of recognition. Here are our picks for the best mastering plugins available in 2023: But, if we are doing it ourselves then hopefully this list of plugins will give you the tools you need to do a decent job and improve your music. A couple of the reasons for using a Mastering Engineer is that they bring a level of expertise in sound processing and a fresh set of ears. It’s a chance to step back and reassess your music from the perspective of delivering a final product. Mastering is what gives your music that final polish. If you are mastering a number of tracks or an album then you’ll also want to keep relative levels similar and it gives you a chance to put together a coherent tracklist. The task is to enhance the sound of the track as a whole, to ensure the overall level is right, that the stereo image is good and to even out the frequency ranges.

The idea is to take a finished track, or a number of tracks, and examine them in a larger context.

Sometimes seen as a bit of a dark art reserved for specialist Engineers, mastering is becoming more accessible all the time through the fabulous plugins and tools that are available to us. Once we've finished mixing our tracks we move on to the task of mastering.

The best free mastering plugins