Splitting the atom
Neutron is a massive package with a lot to offer. You may have heard of its AI functionality and its machinelearned algorithms, but there’s loads more to get your cursor on. At its core, Neutron is a channel strip plugin, offering a reorderable strip of six processors – Gate, EQ, two Compressors, Exciter and Transient Shaper – to do the actual signal sculpting legwork. We’ll show you those in the tutorial below.
To make the most of Neutron, the idea is that you add it to every track (or a number of buses) in a mix, allowing the different instances to communicate with and react to each other. For large projects, small CPUs or tracks you want to mix with your own plugins, there’s the Mix Tap effect, which acts as a sort of ‘Neutron monitor’, telling the other instances what’s on that track but not changing the sound.
Once you’re set up with instances of Neutron or Mix Tap, it’s time to get into the meat of things. Neutron’s Track Assistant is its most talkedabout feature. Engage it, select some target settings, play Neutron the channel’s audio in isolation, and Neutron will use its artificial intelligence to engage its modules and provide a starting point for a full mix. Now we can start tweaking.
Neutron’s EQ is a clever character. With other Neutrons loaded over other channels, you can call up other instruments’ frequency spectra and let the plugin detect any masking that’s going on between the two. You can then go into the Neutron EQ of the masking channel right from the masked channel’s plugin instance as well. The EQ also had individual Learn functionality and Inverse Link, a function that ties a boost in one instance to a cut in another instance.
Once you’ve sorted your channels, the Visual Mixer lets you set levels, panning and width for all channels from the same view, dragging pucks about to make corresponding changes in each plugin instance. Nobody had that in the ’70s!
Tonal Balance Control comes with Neutron and Ozone, and again communicates with other plugin instances to analyse the track’s frequency spectrum, plus the dynamic range of the bass frequencies. Target curves are included, and you can load custom curves from audio files. The aim is to bring ‘tonal balance’ into line with commercial music. Again you can use this plugin to access the EQs within the other instances. We’ll explore that later.
Neutron comes in two types: Advanced ($499) contains everything we’ve outlined here; Elements ($129) strips back what the processors can do and how much Track Assistant can shape; and the ‘Standard model’ [geddit?] foregoes the Tonal Balance Control, Mix Tap, and reduces the Input/Output controls.
Track Assistant is the most talkedabout feature