Music producer/mixer Rob Chiarelli has the first in his Signature Series of DAW plug-ins called Mix Buss Lite. Designed to process the stereo output bus of your DAW mixer to increase the average loudness of your music mix, Mix Buss Lite 2.0 comes in AAX (Pro Tools), AU Macs and VST for Windows.
Mix Buss Lite has simplified controls that allow you to use your ears and not fancy metering. The Input Drive fader sets the amount of loudness boost as indicated by the “Sweet Spot” meter—the orange and yellow lights will flash/glow with occasional red Sat (saturation) blinks.
Mix Buss Lite offers a range of “coloration” effects. Select Fat for accentuating the upper and lower frequencies, Warm thickens mixes in the bass, Clear is full range but with less saturation than Fat, and Full is like Fat except louder.
I found great functionality with Mix Buss Lite beyond the stereo mix bus. It works great for bass guitar and stereo sub groups in Pro Tools 11—stacks of backing vocals and guitar layers all sounded tighter and “fit” better into a big mix.
It sells for $19 as a download.
Barry Rudolph is a recording engineer/mixer who has worked on over 30 gold and platinum records. He has recorded and/or mixed Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hall & Oates, Pat Benatar, Rod Stewart, the Corrs, and more. Barry has his own futuristic music mixing facility and loves teaching audio engineering at Musician’s Institute, Hollywood, CA. He is a lifetime Grammy-voting member of NARAS and a contributing editor for Mix Magazine. http://barryrudolph.com
