Top 5 Greatest Mastering Plug-ins in 2021
Need help mastering? These plug-ins have your back! We are ranking some of the best plug-ins used for mastering music and how they can help your mixes. If you are looking to add a great plug-in to your home studio setup then this list is for you!
A one-stop shop for mastering and super useful, this beefy plug-in might cost a lot, but has a lot going for it. Chock full of different plug-ins such as EQ’s, saturators, compressors, multiband compressors, and limiters, this plug-in makes it simple to make quick masters and adds an element of ease to sessions that require further attention to detail.
Becoming familiar with this plug-in is evolving to be a requirement for many professional sound engineers, so we suggest adding it to your arsenal.
One of the most effective EQ plugins ever made and a staple plug-in for millions of engineers worldwide is the FabFilter Pro Q3. It is one of the greatest plug-ins for mastering on the market! The pro’s of this plug-in are endless as you can simply and accurately affect any master with absolute precision.
Need saturation in your music? Look no further, the Softube Tape plug-in is ideal for adding both low and high order harmonics to give a tape-like feel to your master providing a thicker and warmer sound.
Waves SSL G-Master Buss Compressor ($35.99)
Often referred to as “the glue”, the Waves SSL Master Buss Compressor is great at making all of your individual tracks feel as though they belong together. This plug-in is one of the more well known waves plug-ins used on countless masters to date.
This plug-in is widely regarded as one of the greatest free plug-ins of all time as its precise metering and level analyzing are on par with any pay-for plug-in.
The metering setting is especially useful for mastering because you are often checking the meters and levels to ensure that your song is as good numerically as it is sonically. Overall, Voxengo Span is a fantastic plug-in that can be incredibly useful to any engineer or producer and as we mentioned, it’s free!
These are some of the top mastering plug-ins on the market today but that doesn’t limit them to mastering. In fact, plugins like the FabFilter Pro Q3 are practically essential when mixing and the Waves SSL Master Buss Compressor is known to sound fantastic on harsh instruments like drums.
However you choose to use these plug-ins, we know that you’ll be happy you added them to your home studio’s toolkit.
