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5. Deep referencing and analysis with Plugin Alliance ADPTR Metric AB

1 Marc Adamo, developer of Magic AB, has released a fully-stocked successor in association with Plugin Alliance. Call up an instance as the final plugin on your master channel, then drag up to 16 reference tracks onto Metric AB’s central display to load them into the bottom slots.

2 As with other referencing plugins, operation is simple: hit play in your DAW, click on a slot to select that reference track for playback, click on the waveform to play back at that point, then punch the A/B button to switch between your DAW audio (A) and that reference (B).

3 To match the current reference track’s volume to your DAW audio, manually adjust its Gain value. Alternatively, hit the Match button and Metric will analyse levels and set a suitable Gain value for you. As with Magic AB, you can place up to four Cue and Loop points per track.

4 Metric AB also offers visual analysis tools. Flip to the Spectrum tab and hit Dual to compare your DAW mix (blue) to the current reference song (orange). To isolate specific frequencies, choose a low-, band- or high-pass filter, or pick one of five preset filter ranges.

5 Over in the Stereo Image tab, we can compare our current mix’s stereo information to our reference tracks’ width. In this case, our mix (blue) contains more stereo content in the 1.5kHz to 100Hz region than this reference track – and our ears confirm this.

6 To finish, let’s pop open the Dynamics tab. We can see that, over time, our blue mix has a much higher dynamic range than the orange reference track – those large blue peaks occur during sections where our bassline’s filter cutoff opens out. We can now fix this in the mix.