I have a bad habit of overworking my music. It causes my perspective to get skewed and makes it difficult to see things objectively. I keep tweaking and eventually lose the good thing I had going.
Part of the problem is having too many options in the production environment. That’s why I prefer simple tools and raw aesthetics to avoid getting caught up in the details. Clean and technical is boring to listen to and boring to make anyway.
The sharper my senses, the faster my workflow, the better I know my tools, the more focused I am… The better the chance of noticing important things, making the right connections and honing in on something special.
I focus on getting the basic structure of a project fleshed out as quickly as possible, and then gradually pay more and more attention to the details.
Collaborating helps keep me accountable and locked in on the important ideas. If I’m starting to lose perspective, I step away from the project and work on something else for a bit.
But you know what? Sometimes the initial draft really isn’t great. Sometimes changing it is the right thing to do.
The real challenge is in being able to see each situation as what it truly is.
Some of my best work came from ideas that got flipped upside down. It’s just that it is a consuming way to work. Art is not supposed to be easy, but I’d still rather get it right the first time.
Having situational awareness is key for making the right decisions. Don’t float blindly from one thing to the next; direct the creative process. Have the confidence to stick to your decisions — or not — depending on the situation.
Sometimes it’s best to let loose and see what happens. Other times it pays off to stay disciplined and keep things under control. Over the years I’ve become better at judging these situations. It just comes down to doing lots of work.
Still, there are always projects that don’t go the way I was hoping for. That’s life. With consistent work, the ratio of wins vs failures keeps getting better over time.
When working on music, I often prefer using simple tools. Things that are focused on doing one thing really well.
This is something I’ve only started to learn and understand better in the past couple of years.
These days we have a lot of magnificently complex tools. Tools that sounds great and offer endless options and possibilities. They often look very attractive on the surface. Because with all those features they will do so much more for us, right?
Tools like that are usually not my first choice when making music.
Why?
First, because I am easily distracted. Using simple tools helps me stay on track and focus on the task at hand.
Second, complex tools tend to take more time to handle and manage. If I’m using a lot of tools like that, it adds up.
I design and develop my music making process with intention — asking myself questions like: What kind of workflow are my choices contributing towards? Am I making things easier or harder? Am I building momentum and consistency?
I don’t think everything can or should be dumbed down. It’s about choosing the methods and tools that are right for each moment.
I often draw for more complex tools for things like problem solving or mastering.
But option overload is real. It’s clearly one of the biggest problems of our time.
When making music I want to tap into the flow state. That allows me to move forward fast. Maintaining the momentum is very important.
The more I can simplify my process, the better it gets.
I try to cultivate a way of making music that’s built around my personality.
Instead of blindly taking in too much external advice or influence… I try to become more aware of who I am and what I want.
At any moment, I ask the question:
How can I move towards a music making experience that is more in line with who I am?
I experiment with lots of different things to learn what works for me.
More importantly, this process teaches what isn’t for me.
For example, everyone loves analog synths right? They’re cool and sound warm and great. But I tend to prefer the digital FM stuff in my music. It’s a sound I like more.
In the same way, I go against the grain with many things. And with other things, I go with the grain, too!
By now, after 26 years of making electronic music, I have lots of very specific thoughts about how I want to do things.
This personality based process allows me to work in a way that is very tuned with what makes me tick. It helps me get into a flow state, to focus, work faster and get better results.
Everything works out better because there is less resistance.
It also leads to a certain character in my music. A signature sound that is true to who I am, and one that nobody can copy. Because it’s a sum of so many experiments and decisions I’ve taken over the years.
There’s so much noise out there. It’s sometimes hard to see your path. That’s ok. Just strive to be honest to yourself as you move forward.
Over time you’ll begin to trust your gut feeling more. Even when it goes against common advice or popular ways of doing things.
We are currently in the middle of the end of the year discount craze. A lot of audio companies are promoting new products also.
I really enjoy checking out new plugins and tools.
It’s easy to forget that buying new tools is not just a monetary investment. It also prompts us to acquire the skills to use those tools properly.
What’s the cost of that? Your time and attention. A disruption of your normal workflow.
Many times, we end up not wanting to spend those costs. And the shiny new thing we bought ends up neglected.
The money is wasted and we end up with extra mental baggage for having made a useless investment.
Why not invest directly in our skills and understanding of our existing tools?
This investment can have a much bigger impact than a new tool ever could.
Skills — not tools — is what truly helps us get ahead of the curve.
(By the way — If you’re looking for a free, supportive community to help you grow your skills in music production, you’re welcome to join the Resoundsound Discord — invite link for you here.)
I have dedicated countless hours to expanding my knowledge of many of my favourite tools. I continue to make time for it by regularly practicing, watching tutorials, and re-reading manuals.
When considering buying something, I strive to be honest with myself. I make a clear distinction between utility and pleasure. Does it bring genuine value to my work? Usually I want a new purchase to solve a bottleneck situation. Or do I simply crave the novelty and enjoyment it may offer?
I give myself the permission to buy stuff just to have fun with it, as long as I’m honest about it. I try to strike a balance between work and fun, but I do get distracted more than I would wish.
Never the less, it’s always a good time to remind ourselves: There is more we can do with what we already have.
What’s the difference between making good or bad mixing decisions?
For many, it’s the difference between looking and listening.
As modern music makers, we are constantly being lured into a world that shouldn’t be our priority.
We’re visual creatures by nature. It’s instinctive to judge the world based on what we see. This poses a challenge in music making, which has become increasingly visual over the years. Focusing on looking makes it harder to listen.
There’s only a certain capacity in our brain to process sensory information. If a large part of that capacity is used up processing visual inputs, there’s less available for processing what we hear.
I’m not a brain scientist, but the assumption is easy to validate. Close your eyes and listen without looking. It instantly becomes easier to notice things, right?
The modern music making environment has its perks — and its downfalls. It’s a blessing and a curse. I’m not here to turn back time, though.
But is there something we could do to help us listen better? I can think of a few things.
1. Focus on listening by using tools that offer less visual cues, like interactive EQ curves and spectrum graphs.
2. Invest in tools with great UI design — they’ll guide you and get you the info you need quickly. Result: Less time spent looking, more listening.
3. Use more outboard equipment and instruments. Get away from the computer screen — even for a bit — it always helps.
4. Use controllers that enable you to work without looking so much. Even if it slows down your workflow, it buys you time to listen better and make smarter decisions.
5. Use visual metering tools to help confirm what you are hearing or spot potential problems — but don’t rely on them exclusively.
6. Take moments to listen without looking at the DAW. Close your eyes or just look elsewhere. Take a pause and listen to it in another room/outside/on your phone speaker, etc
Remembering to listen properly when everyone else is focused on looking can be your competitive advantage!
The folks at Pulsar Audio kindly hooked me up with their EQ plugin Massive so I could work with it for a while and give you my thoughts. I’ve been using it in mastering as well as some mixing work for a few weeks now. Here is my review of Pulsar Massive.
Disclaimer:I only ever write about products I like. Pulsar Audio hooked me up with Massive for free so that I could get to know it and work with it for a while to do a proper review. They have no say in the content of this review. This post contains affiliate links. If you decide to buy through them, you are supporting my work.
What is Pulsar Massive?
Pulsar Massive is an emulation of one of the most famous EQ’s around – the Massive Passive.
It accurately models the original, but adds a modern feature set on top.
Pulsar Massive
It’s a great EQ for situations where you want to gently shape the tonality of the material, without changing its nature too much. Common applications include mastering, vocals and drum bus or mix bus.
It’s not a surgical EQ. It can do some tighter curve shapes only in the low end. It comes with some special curves for the low and high band. These make it useful for specific tasks like boosting sub bass without affecting the upper bass region, or adding top end air without adding harshness below.
As a passive parallel design, Pulsar Massive has a gentle, natural and balanced character. Most EQ’s you’ll come across are serial design where bands will add gain on top of each other. Stacking bands in a parallel design does not result in gain adding up.
This passive topology makes for a very different band interaction compared to serial EQ’s. It can feel easier to work with for applications like mastering.
Pulsar Massive also models the tube amplifiers and inductors in Massive Passive. This means you can drive it to introduce saturation and subtle dynamic behaviour.
Saturation
Pulsar Massive can be made to sound clean or coloured, depending on how hard you drive it. You can also choose between two different types of transformer saturations, or bypassing it entirely.
I find the sound of the saturation in this plugin a very useful one. Most of the time I don’t push it. Used subtly, it can enhance the material in a nice way and make things pop better.
When you drive it harder it gets really crunchy. I don’t consider a competition for dedicated saturation plugins and I don’t like using it that way – it’s an EQ after all. But it can introduce some nice aggression to things like drums if desired.
The drive control is level compensated. This makes it easy to assess how the sound is changing.
Up to 4x oversampling is available to keep aliasing distortion at bay if needed.
Filters
The plugin is modelled precisely from the Massive Passive. The filter shapes and behaviour are a little bit unusual compared to most EQ’s out there today.
With the bell filters, the gain does not affect the bandwidth (Q) of the filter. But changing the bandwidth affects the gain. This works well for the type of work the EQ is mostly intended (broad band shaping, for example in a mastering situation).
The shelves have some interesting features where boosting one area can create a dip, followed by a boost in another area. The filters will also interact in interesting ways, creating surprising curve shapes.
The curves are wonderful for broad tone shaping work.
However, it was a really nice surprise for me to find out that there are some special shapes happening in the extreme lows and extreme highs. These areas are marked with yellow numbers in the low and air shelf bands.
The curves are all explained in the manual. But it’s really handy to have the curve display. It helps you learn how the EQ behaves and what you can do with it in different situations.
Special curves on the low and top shelf (extreme settings). Plugin Doctor (left) shows how the scaling of the curve display affects our perception.
The bottom end sharp curve is great for working on the sub bass without affecting the upper bass region.
The top end curve works really well for adding air while keeping harshness at bay.
These are really nice features to have as it means you can often nail the bass as well as the top end, while doing the broad tone shaping this EQ does so well. Without these special curves I would more often be reaching for another EQ to target those areas.
Pulsar Massive is fantastic for getting a big bottom end without making things muddy. Equally it’s great for adding clarity and air in the top end without making it harsh. The usual bell and shelf filters work great for getting the overall tone of the material where it needs to be – whether it’s adding some upper mids or reducing muddyness.
Band interaction
As usual with passive EQ’s, there is interaction between the EQ bands. It makes working with the EQ unpredictable, especially when you’re still new to it. This is both good and bad.
If know I want to achieve a specific boost or cut at a specific frequency, this type of EQ is not my first choice. But if I just want to start shaping the sound, roll with it and see what happens it’s great.
Sometimes I’m not making progress with another EQ. In those situations it’s really nice to have something like Massive which can offer a different perspective.
User experience
I would argue one of the most important things in an EQ is the user experience. The choice of included features, how well they work and how they all come together in the user interface.
How does it feel to work with? Does it guide you towards a workflow that gives you good results? How fast is it to achieve what you want with it? Do you enjoy using it?
I spend a lot of time in the EQ and those things are really important to me.
Pulsar Audio have done a great job on this front. Massive offers the charm and character of an outboard device just as well as many other good faithfully modelled plugins do.
However, Pulsar Audio have still managed to include a lot of modern features and design also. The great attention to detail makes the experience of using the EQ much better. The user experience is the single main reason why I like it so much.
For me, it comes down to details like:
Auto gain that works like it’s supposed to. Many EQ’s have auto gain. But they’re not all created equal. I don’t always use auto gain, but I usually do for tone shaping. It helps me accurately assess changes in tone, without being fooled by changes in volume.
Level compensated drive control that goes from almost completely clean to very distorted.
Well placed band on/off and Mid/Side solo switches.
The ability to view and edit in classic knob mode, modern graph mode, or both.
Stepped controls (with many options), with the ability adjust in continuous mode by right clicking on the knobs.
The ability to enter values in text.
A/B slots.
Great metering (Peak+RMS and input/output difference).
Good tooltips.
Good manual.
Freely resizable interface, which actually also makes the text bigger instead of just increasing the size of the window.
Many of those things seem like normal features to have in an EQ. But there are not many plugins out there that get all of it right consistently.
I really appreciate when a developer has thought about the details. It makes for a smooth user experience, which leads to better results.
The auto listen
Here follows my only complaint about Pulsar Massive. In the grand scheme of things it’s fairly minor. But because of it I’m still reaching for the Knif Soma sometimes instead.
I love that Pulsar Audio have added an auto listen (band solo) feature. But its implementation doesn’t make sense to me.
First, the auto listen only works form the curve display. You hold shift while dragging a band. That’s fine, but I often prefer to work with the curve display hidden. As far as I can tell, there is no way of using auto listen in that mode.
Second… The auto listen has a very tight Q value. As soon as you engage it, the sound gets very resonant.
That’s great for hunting resonances or other offending frequencies. For a surgical EQ I would get that. But Massive is not a surgical EQ. You can’t really target very specific spots or resonances with it (except in the lower bass region).
Paradoxically, the tight auto listen filter makes the feature useless for broad shaping work, which this EQ is really designed for. It’s very hard to “hear and think” through the resonant boost of the auto listen filter.
Why not make the auto listen follow the actual bandwidth (Q) setting that is active in the EQ? This is how it works in many other EQ’s, and it’s a much better behaviour in my opinion.
Pulsar Audio – if you are listening… Could we perhaps have an option in the settings to change the auto listen behaviour?
I use four different types of EQ’s, depending on the situation:
Minimum phase EQ for surgical / general work (MAAT ThEQblue).
Linear phase EQ for phase-critical work (Weiss EQ1).
Dynamic EQ for enhancement or solving specific problems (DMG Multiplicity / Weiss EQ1).
Parallel EQ for overall tone shaping (Pulsar Massive / Knif Soma).
I’ve really enjoyed using Pulsar Massive for tone shaping. I am still likely to keep using Soma in certain situations. It provides a slightly different workflow that I also like and the auto listen is much better implemented.
I like using Pulsar Massive (and any other tone shaping EQ) without the graph and spectrum analyser visible. This helps me to focus on the listening. I will pop open the graph to learn about the curves though.
Trial, copy protection, system requirements
Pulsar Audio Massive uses iLok copy protection. It can be activated into the computer or on the iLok USB stick. A fully functional 14 day free trial is available.
You can check the current system requirements here.
Is Pulsar Massive worth it?
Pulsar Massive costs $149 at the time of writing this. It’s definitely on the expensive side when it comes to EQ plugins. To me, it’s also quite possibly the best product out there in its category.
I could live without it, because I already have many great EQ’s. But it’s definitely offering me something different and I have often reached really good results with it during testing.
Pulsar Massive review – Conclusion
Pulsar Massive is a really well made, professional grade tool for tone shaping work.
It sounds great. And I particularly enjoy how comfortable it is to work with. The features, user interface and attention to detail all comes together in a really nice way. My only complaint is the implementation of the auto listen feature, which feels incomplete.
It’s not an EQ for all situations. If you haven’t worked with a Massive Passive type EQ before (I hadn’t), it takes some time to begin to understand how to best use it.
The manual is good and helps a great deal in figuring it out. The included tooltips are also very useful in learning the plugin.
It’s a well rounded package and a joy to work with. It comes at a cost, but you get a lot for the money. If you’re looking for an EQ for tone shaping, Pulsar Massive has my full recommendation.
