I’ve always found it extremely interesting how much our eyes can influence what we think we’re hearing. I’m sure you’ve seen those posts on TikTok or IG where they show a word on the screen while a voiceover says it out loud. Then a different word pops up, and now you hear the new word, even though the audio is exactly the same! It’s a mind bending experiment on how our eyes can deceive our ears.
You can spend an hour getting a mix exactly where you want it, open a spectrum analyzer, and suddenly start questioning the low end because it looks different from another record. But did anything actually change? The music sounds exactly the same. Now you have a visual reference influencing how you evaluate it.
There is a difference though between looking at a meter to help you decide what sounds good and looking at a meter to understand what you just did.
Tell me if you agree. If you’re mastering a record and the drums feel good, you probably don’t need a gain reduction meter telling you whether you’re allowed to like them. But wouldn’t it be useful to know that the distortion you’re hearing when the hook comes in is actually coming from a buildup in the low mids rather than the high end in the vocals? Or how much space your bass is taking up in the stereo field? Or whether pushing the signal harder is actually giving you any meaningful additional loudness?
We thought those were pretty good reasons to add meters in Master Plan 2. We just wanted to make sure we give people that information without losing what we liked about the original plugin.
So we decided to give people both options. A full suite of beautiful looking meters to help you understand what you’re hearing, and our “Ears Only” mode where you can turn off the visual metering, make your adjustments, and listen without the visuals influencing your decisions. And whenever you want, you can bring the meters back.
We wanted people to focus on the music without needing a graph to validate what they were hearing. But there’s also value in making a musical decision with your ears and using measurements to understand it.
Now with Master Plan 2, you can do both.
