If you crave extreme levels (say, up to a deafening -5dB RMS), FG-X will comply with your instructions, but you'll get some treble distortion and audible transient saturation. In fact, we could even get it sounding a little louder! FG-X was less squashed, more punchy, and more like the original mix.

We even tried FG-X on some unmastered mixes of commercial tracks, and the results quickly exceeded the original released versions, which had used painstakingly dialled-in plug-in chains to get the levels up. With a decent mix, we had no problems getting our masters up to commercial levels. Those guitar chugs, for instance, stay right up in your face.įG-X is very transparent indeed. Not so with FG-X: elements stay focused and locked in their places, and the bass remains solid. With limiters, mix elements are always jostling for attention for example, chugging guitars can sink back slightly behind thudding kick drums. At sensibly loud levels (eg, up to -9dB RMS), FG_X had the edge over other loudness processors we tried - even beating our previous favourite, Ozone 4's limiter. We tested FG-X on material in a range of modern genres, from indie, rock and metal to DnB and hard dance. Oh, and it's worth a try on instruments, too - we like what it can do on a drums bus, for instance. Interestingly, it's one of the few master bus compressors we've found to be useful with complex, full-on material like extreme metal, as it can control these mixes without simply overreacting. We found it equally adept at providing subtle mix 'glue', gentle level riding, and giving material a 'compressed' feel without being obnoxious. It's hard to make it pump, yet somehow it still grabs the transients in all the right places. Sonically, FG Comp is audio butter - it's one of the smoothest, most transparent compressors we've heard. Unlike a lot of compressors, the gain reduction meter is set to show a very small range of just 3dB by default, which is spot-on for most mastering situations.

Metal slate fgx