What I’ve always found so incredibly exciting about making computer-based music like dance or beat-making is that, unlike all other forms of music, it allows you to have complete control over the outcome and impart as much of yourself into the song as possible. Everything from the chord progressions to the sonic aesthetics imparted through the mix and mastering stages can all be a reflection of the single artist who made it.
That said, it would take many lifetimes (and a healthy chunk of change) to master (pun only semi-intended) every step of the process. More and more plugins and tools are hitting the market to give professional results without decades of experience. Most of these tools are “AI-driven” and suck…
But Musik Hack’s latest mastering plugin, Master Plan, toes the line between professional quality and consumer accessibility. When they asked us to check it out for a full review, I jumped because AI-powered mastering plugins take all the soul and emotion out of the process. I’m desperately looking for something that can help me, an actual human, and the community I write to (that’s you, also a real human being) get that last little bit of polish from the tracks we make.
So let’s get into it.
Learn More About This Plugin Through Their Website Here
What Is Musik Hack’s Master Plan Plugin?
Master Plan by Musik Hack is a game-changer in the mastering game, designed with clarity, warmth, and punch in mind. It’s a go-to for getting tracks release-ready, offering a straightforward approach with controls that hit right where they need to. This tool packs a serious punch, from boosting loudness without the crunch to adding analog vibes and ensuring your stereo image is on point. It’s all about giving you the power to make those broad strokes and then dive into the details with precision—think of it as the Swiss Army knife in your mastering toolkit.
At its heart is the LOUD knob, ready to crank your tracks up to 24dB without breaking a sweat, surrounded by essential tone-shaping controls. But it doesn’t stop there; it’s loaded with extras for fine-tuning—saturation, compression, and even tape emulation. Whether you’re cleaning up the mix or going for that thick, analog feel, Master Plan has your back. And with its clever layout, it encourages you to focus on what matters most, making those critical adjustments with confidence.
In a nutshell, Master Plan stands out as a robust, all-in-one mastering solution. It champions the less-is-more approach, ensuring you can enhance your tracks without overdoing it. Easy to use yet powerful in its delivery, it enables novices and seasoned pros to achieve professional-grade loudness and polish with minimal fuss. Musik Hack has delivered a plugin that doesn’t just aim to win the loudness wars—if loudness is your battlefield, Master Plan is your secret weapon.
Now, with all the technical mumbo-jumbo out of the way, listen to the premaster an artist we are signing to our new label sent us, which we will use as an example throughout the rest of this review. At the same time, we talk about all the best features, and I’d love to see a couple of them improved.
What I Liked About Master Plan
The Presets Are Solid
As with anything as nuanced as mastering can be, having a few different points to jump in at is always helpful, and the laundry list of presets is precisely that. There isn’t an overwhelming amount of presets either, just a compelling batch of 25-ish presets that each drastically beef up and master the track in different ways.
Not only does scrolling through these presets show you the range of characters your final master could achieve, but it also showcases the range of sounds and timbres this plugin can pull off. From dim and warm to bright and clean, it is interesting to notice just how much different approaches to mastering can bring to a mix.
Here are some of my favorite presets, switching every two bars on the premaster we’re working with. Some changes are certainly more subtle than others, but that’s what mastering is all about.
It Gets Results Fast
There’s something to be said about the condensed interface that removes many of the more convoluted touch points that frequently cause more user error in a mix than anything else. With just over ten parameters across the plugin to adjust, you can invest your attention instead into the controls that significantly impact the final result, getting better results quicker!
Below is the master I achieved ten minutes after bringing the premaster into Ableton.
The Built In Referencing Is Clever!
I really loved this small, subtle switch on the right side of the plugin that allowed you to hear what your master sounds like on their versions of different playback systems. It obviously wouldn’t ever replace bouncing the master to audio so that you can listen on iPod headphones or your phone speaker outside of the studio, but it is a fast and easy way to get an idea of what it will sound like when you do.
Below is the phone version of what it thinks my master would sound like once I play it on my phone’s speakers.
What I Wasn’t Crazy About
It Can’t Compete With A Pro
Mastering music at the highest level is an art form that takes as much dedication and mastery as the art of music production itself, and a plugin like this can never compete with the decades of experience and thousands of hours of ear training that mastering engineers have. That being said, it doesn’t try to serve a different purpose and market.
While I’m sure Musik Hack would love to learn of their plugin being used on a single Grammy-winning master or something, it’s far more likely that thousands of smaller artists and producers will be quietly using this plugin to get their WIPs loud enough to play live at their next gig, beef up a beat so that it makes more sales on Beatstars, or to polish up their self-released music.
Personally, it’s forever cemented its place on my master out of my production template so that I can get a beefy and warm sound while I’m producing that has a bit more class and character than Ableton’s stock limiter (which has been my standard to ensure volume while I’m in the creative stages for years).
The GUI Could Use More Clarity
One of the first things I noticed when busting open this plugin is that some of the knobs are a bit hard to read. Not so terrible, of course, that they are impossible to read entirely, but the text on some of the critical buttons seemed foggy.
And the fact that I could not find an option to scale or upsize the plugin left a bit to be desired on the GUI-front.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
