AS EASY AS CAN BE.

ZONES

Zone 1: EQ | Zone 2: Dynamics | Zone 3: Saturation | Zone 4: Special FX | Zone 5: Loudness

These settings were designed to offer presets in the form of layers that you ideally would add in the sequential order that they are labeled. This will give you detailed control of your mastering chain and offer surgical precision in every step of the way to the finished product. To get started using these settings, you add an instance of EZmix 2 to the end of your mastering chain. From there, you select any ‘Zone 5 (Loud)’ preset, which at 100% will get you a competitively loud -6 LUFS short-term output (given the correct input level). It’s very much not recommended to go past this point, unless you are a very experienced user, since distortion increases exponentially. The ‘Ceiling’ knob is always set up to give you an output level of -0.2 dBFS and can be adjusted down to -2 dBFS to protect against unwanted distortion from the audio codecs used by streaming services. By doing this, your entire chain is now calibrated and you can go ahead and experiment going from Zone 1 to 4 and add processing in that order before the ‘Zone 5 (Loud)’ preset.

Pro tip from the engineer:
“If your source signal is too loud, either clip-gain your audio down, use a gain plug-in or other feature in your DAW before it’s hitting your EZmix 2 chain. Don’t use the ‘Input’ knob of the ‘Zone 5 (Loud)’ preset for this unless it’s the only instance of EZmix 2 that you’re planning to use. If you do that and then add processing before it, the input level going into that stage will already be too loud for the intended gain staging.”

GENRES

In the section of presets preceded with a genre label, you will find multipurpose starting points tailored for different genres (metal, pop and rock). That being said, don’t let any of the labels scare you from using the presets in other types of genres as well! The main idea with all these these settings is that they involve elaborate and complete processing chains with the intent of producing finished masters.

SPECIFIC

These presets are meant to handle very specific hurdles that might pop up during a mastering session. Maybe you need a de-esser tailored for vinyl mastering? Or you might have a vocal pop out a little too much? You will find the solution to these kinds of scenarios within this category of presets.