Contents
What is Mixroom?
Our Mixroom review cover Mixroom by Mastering The Mix which is an EQ plugin to aid with mix and master balance. It is marketed as being an intelligent EQ plugin with the aim of helping producers make more decisive mix decisions quickly.
Having previously used Levels by Mastering The Mix I was hoping of more the same. I hoped that the intuitive nature of Levels was going to be followed in this product too. I excited to be able to do this Mixroom review and see what this plugin was all about.
The Install
The plugin falls in amongst the Mastering The Mix plugin installer. It makes it nice and easy to install. With the Mastering The Mix installer it is possible to install selected plugins. Otherwise you can try all their plugins for free for 15 days. Then the relevant parts required get downloaded and installed.
This then gets scanned by your DAW (in my case the wonderful Bitwig Studio 3).
Mixroom Review: Functionality in the DAW
Once all my VST scanning had taken place (I used the VST3 version of the available installs as I have no need for anything else) and I loaded up the plugin initially on the master chain. In the first instance I decided to try an overall mix shape and get a general feel for the plugin.
I must admit that on first use I was concious this was not as intuitive as I would have liked it to be. I think this is a lot to do with the fact that I am very used to Fab Filters offering which is Pro Q 3.
I’m also used to working left to right when it comes to these things so getting familiar with the bottom to top frequency layout will take time (for me anyway).
When doing this Mixroom review what I really liked with the initial testing was the hover over help tool tips.
When I was not sure on how a function worked or what a function did, it is just a case of holding the pointer at the relevant part and this throws up a context menu with brief – but descriptive – instructions on what the function is and how to use it. A great feature.
So how does it sound?
I started by dropping in a little riff via my U-He Repro-5 plugin and got a kind of sparkle effect chiming bells playing. Along with this I placed some dirty analogue strings. I wanted to cover as much of the frequency spectrum in as few instruments as possible. Two reasons:
The sparkles popped out in the mix beautifully when playing with the 1Khz preset bar (I forgot to say I added in an Electronic EDM preset from the bottom menu with a 4 band range from the top menu). Dragging around the mouse with the button clicked moved the boxes around.
On first impressions doing the Mixroom review it seemed to be a case of jiggle round until you find the right sound. I think on further use it will be more use to finely tune the entries but this worked for a demo at least!
Features I’ve not yet tried
Still so many in the list, but like I say there are more parts to learn with this plugin. I’ll continue to add to this Mixroom review when I investigate some of these features I’ve still got to look forward to:
Mixroom Review Conclusion
It seems whether using on a mix element (ie one one specific track) or as a master bus function there are options for both. I’ve yet to investigate these however the more I use the tool, the more I find other parts which I like.
When I did this Mixroom review, did I find it intelligent? Yes. The algorithms in the back end certainly offer great output. Is it versatile? I’d say so – there is a preset for every area of a mix.
I must admit I’m always surprised with the quality of the products from Mastering The Mix. I never set the bar too high with my expectations because of the price but every time they blow me away with the features and value – not to mention the excellent performance of the products.
Retailing at only £49, you can buy Mixroom by Mastering The Mix from Pluginboutique.
