A few months back The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad went on a rant about “The Loudness Wars”, bemoaning how music now sounds like shit because it’s being crushed in the mastering stage. Symptoms of said shittiness include loss of dynamics, smeared low-end, distortion, and disappearing snare drums. We said we’d never screw our fans over by giving them an album with RMS (average loudness) of more than – 12db, compared to the -6db of some new releases.

Then Steven “Bang” Slate (maker of Steven Slate Drums, who actually is a real guy – and a pretty cool one considering he didn’t yell at us for making fun of his nickname) came out with Steven Slate FG-X Virtual Mastering Processor and made us look like jerks. This new and fairly revolutionary software package allows much louder masters without all of the aural destruction usually associated with “The Loudness Wars”. With this tool we’ve been able to push the masters from our new album Boneslinky! to at least -10db and they still sound better than they did with the tools we were using to get them to -12db.

So let’s just get this out of the way: The Flute Squad is taking back what we said!

With FG-X we’re now more than happy to release our masters at -10db, and maybe even louder. The proof is in the audio! [audiophiles can download the .wav version of these clips by clicking the link underneath each clip]

First up is an unmastered clip of “Bitchmade”, from our new album Boneslinky!

Bitchmade (Unmastered) by flutesquad

Next is a mastered version of the same clip, made with our old “secret sauce” blend of numerous compressors, clippers, and limiters. It took months to tweak this mastering chain for best results, and even with all of that work the low end is still a bit flabby, the high-end is reduced, and the whole thing seems somehow constricted. But it is louder, and it sounds pretty good. Turn down your speakers/headphones before listening to this one.

Bitchmade (Original Master) by flutesquad

Finally, here is the FG-X version, at the same loudness. It took about 5 minutes to get it to sound this good. Notice how it sounds almost exactly like the unmastered version, except louder. Punchy kick and snare, intact treble, and an openness that is not present in the old mastered version. Now, this isn’t a massive difference from the old master, but it is a very noticeable improvement, and it only took one plugin as opposed to three or four painstakingly tweaked plugins.

Bitchmade (FG-X Master) by flutesquad

According to Slate Digital, software designer extraordinaire Fabrice Gabriel designed some crazy new algorithms for this plugin. In their words, “The ITP [intelligent transient preservation] process uses a complex lookahead detection algorithm to analyze oncoming transients and groups of transients. It then optimizes a specialized set of saturation curves for that specific transient. For example, if the ITP algorithm’s lookahead identifies a kick drum transient, it will optimize the algorithm so that it preserves low frequency energy. For a snare drum transient, it will optimize the algorithm to preserve upper mid range punch.”

Or something. I don’t claim to understand this voodoo magic, but it does work.

Installation
Installation was easy, with a simple installer. Authorization, however, involves an iLok, which is kind of annoying. You have to buy this little blue USB dongle, put it in your computer (thus permanently taking up a USB slot), authorize the dongle on the iLok site, upload your FG-X license to the site, and then associate it with the dongle. The upside to all of this nonsense is that the dongle can be moved from computer to computer, so in theory you can use the software anywhere. Bring it to rival mastering houses and laugh as you get better sounding masters with one plugin than they do with a whole rack of gear!

As an aside, this thing does eat up a fair amount of processing power. Unless you have a super crazy computer you’re probably not going to want to stick this on your master buss and mix through it. On the plus side, it didn’t cause my computer to crash, which is more than I can say for a lot of other software I own.

Features
There are a few different sections/features in the software that take some time to learn. Presets are included, but I’m not 100% sure how useful they’re going to be for anyone. If you’re relying on presets in the mastering stage, you probably shouldn’t be doing mastering. But I guess they do give a good jumping-off point for your own customization. There is also an A/B switch that lets you easily compare two different configurations, which can be helpful if you can’t decide which settings sound best on a given song.

First up is the Compressor section.

To be honest, I didn’t end up using this much. While it does sound extremely transparent even at high gain reduction, I don’t usually use compression during mastering, preferring the sound and feel of a “color” compressor in the mixing stage. But people seem to be spazzing out about the compressor, so it’s probably worthwhile for those of you who do use compressors during mastering.

Next in line is the Limiting section, which is where the real magic happens.

The two crucial controls here are the gain knob (self-explanatory) and the ITP slider. The ITP slider controls the “hardness” of the transients. Turn it up and you have a ton of punch, turn it down and everything is smoother. Here are two examples of the same clip that should give you an idea of what ITP does: the first has ITP set to the lowest setting, and the second is set to the highest setting.

Bitchmade (Low ITP) by flutesquad

Bitchmade (High ITP) by flutesquad

What I found is that at high gain settings, sometimes if you crank the ITP you end up with crackling distortion in your audio. According to Steven, this either means that

a) you need to turn the ITP down because you’re pushing the limits (no pun intended) of what the software can do, or

b) the mix sucks and has way too much low-end content.

If the mix sucks, ask for a remix, or be prepared to do a lot of surgical cutting in the low end. In this respect FG-X ends up being a great tool for finding any low end issues in mixes. If the mix is fine but you still want the punch that a high ITP setting offers, it’s very easy to simply automate this control. Set it lower for the parts of the mix that crackle (shouldn’t be more than a second or two here and there), and crank it back up for the sections that are fine. I personally tried to keep the ITP on 8 or higher for our rock songs, and lowered it for the less aggressive mixes.

The next control is Dynamic Preservation. To be honest, I have no solid idea of exactly what this does, but I like it. What I found was that this control increases the perceived volume of your mix without increasing the actual level (i.e., the peaks stay the same), so in this respect it seems to be working like a compressor. It’s hard to describe, but I ended up setting it at 5 or higher on most mixes.

The two other controls in the limiter section are the ones I used the least, but which are still very helpful: Lo Punch and Detail.

They pretty much do what they say. Lo Punch boosts the low end of the mix, meaning that it brings out the kick drum almost exclusively. Detail adds snap to transients, which has the effect of increasing the crack of the snare and the click of the kick drum. I can see how these would be very useful if you’re given a shitty mix where the kick and snare are buried (either by too much compression in the mix stage, or just by a crappy mixing engineer). I personally used them occasionally out of pure laziness, finding it easier to turn these knobs instead of going back and re-mixing and re- exporting an entire song just because I wanted the kick .5db louder.

Bitchmade (High Punch Detail) by nikcbhp

Not to be ignored is the Constant Gain Monitoring button, which gives you an easy way to tell what FG- X is doing to your audio. It turns down the volume on the master to match the original mix, so that you can toggle FG-X on and off and not have the volume shift dramatically. This is awesome because you can use it to make your master sound exactly like your mix, just louder. Or you can use it to hear what the Lo Punch, Detail, and Dynamic Preservation controls are adding to your master compared to what’s in the mix. My theory is that if you can hear a huge difference you’ve probably overdone it and should turn down the knobs, unless you’re starting with a really bad mix that needs a lot of work (although in that case you should probably be tackling the issues with an EQ and multi-band compressor before touching FG-X).

I should also mention that there are two other important settings in the limiter console that can be accessed by pressing “dither and ceiling settings”. Here you set your dither bit level (16 bits for export to CD) and absolute output ceiling, meaning that no peaks will get louder than this setting. The manual doesn’t say what kind of dithering is used, and while this might be important to some people, I found that it was transparent, which is all I ask out of dithering. I also kept the ceiling at -0.2db; you can set it wherever you want, but this level has always worked out for me in that it doesn’t cause distortion on any of the CD players I’ve used.

Finally, FG-X includes a nice metering section.

It displays both peak and RMS values in a bar graph and needle formats, with lots of customizable settings for both. I tended to use another metering plugin just because I’m more comfortable with how it translates, but these meters seem very accurate and are nice to look at to boot.

Value

At $300 this is a great deal, especially considering that this is pretty much the pinnacle of what’s out there now as far as limiters go. Given that quality, Steven Slate could easily charge thousands for it and mastering engineers would buy it, no questions asked. But it seems like Slate is on an almost fanatical mission to make the horrible artifacts of “The Loudness Wars” a thing of the past. In his words, with FG-X, “music will sound better, and maybe instead of ‘loudness wars’, we can have ‘loudness parties.’”

Bravo, Steven. You bring the chips, and DMFS will bring the beer.

Rating

Usability: 9 out of 10
The FG-X interface is a pleasure to work with and gets you results quickly. Pretty much any moron could slap this on and instantly get a nice loud master with minimal artifacts. iLok is annoying, though.

Features: 10 out of 10
Includes a whole bunch of stuff aside from the main limiter, including a nice compressor, transparent dithering, and metering.

Performance: 10 out of 10
Sounds amazing. Probably the best limiter out there right now. Extremely stable.

Value: 9 out of 10
It’s definitely worth the price, but possibly out of range of amateur home recordists.

Total Score: 9.5 out 10

If you’ve used this plugin, we’d like to hear what you think. Leave a comment!

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If you found this review helpful then check out:

ELECTRONIC DRUMS IN THE STUDIO: Review – Steven Slate Drums 3.5

ELECTRONIC DRUMS IN THE STUDIO: Review – Toontrack’s EZDrummer and Superior Drummer