Manual
Using SPECTRA
Ten minutes to read, and you will know what every control does and when to reach for it.
1. Quick start
SPECTRA opens doing nothing at all: everything that shapes the sound starts at zero. You open it up from there.
- Put it on a bus, a stem or your master.
- Pick a variant: Live while recording, Standard while mixing, Master for the final bounce.
- Turn Shape up slowly while the music plays. Stop where it sounds right; for most material that is somewhere between 20 % and 50 %.
- If single notes or cymbals still poke out when they ring, add Compress.
- Use Follow to decide how much of the material’s own balance to keep: lower steers towards SPECTRA’s reference, higher keeps your balance and only evens out what sticks out of it.
- Leave Auto gain on and hit Bypass now and then. Same loudness, so you hear the change and not the level.
That is the whole workflow. Everything below is detail.
2. The idea behind it
There are two ways to shape tone automatically, and SPECTRA does both.
The first compares your music to a reference curve — an idea of how a balanced mix is distributed across the spectrum — and steers towards it. That is powerful on material that genuinely leans one way, and heavy-handed on a mix that is already where you want it.
The second leaves your macro balance alone and corrects only what sticks out of it: a resonance that rings, a build-up where instruments mask each other, a hole where something is missing. That keeps the character of your mix, but it will not fix a mix that is simply too dark.
Follow blends between the two, without steps. And because the target is a curve, not a rule, you can change it: the six EQ nodes are added to the target, so the automatic correction steers towards the shape you drew instead of fighting it.
3. Reading the analyser
Everything is drawn relative to the reference curve as it is voiced, so material that sits on that curve draws as a flat line through the middle. That is worth remembering: a flat line does not mean a flat frequency response, it means a balanced one.
| Spectrum | The processed output, navy with a steel edge. |
|---|---|
| Average | A slow average of the output — the pale line. This is the one to read; the fast one moves too much to judge. |
| Target | Cream and dashed: where SPECTRA is steering, including your nodes. |
| Correction | What the filters are doing right now — amber where it lifts, steel blue where it cuts, drawn as the filters actually realise it. In M/S the side’s correction is a dotted violet line. |
| EQ | The mint line: your own nodes. |
The shaded strips at both ends are outside the working range. Drag the little handles at either edge to move them: what lies outside is left untouched, which is useful when you want the rumble below 30 Hz or the air above 16 kHz left exactly as it is.
With Shape and Compress at zero the analyser says so in plain words. In bypass the correction is drawn at a sixth of its strength, so you can see what it would do.
4. Live, Standard and Master
All three steer towards exactly the same curve. Switching changes how the correction is realised, not what it is — so you can set up in Live and switch to Master for the bounce, and switching while the music plays makes no click.
| Live · 0 ms | No latency at all. For tracking, for monitoring, and for anything that must not lag. |
|---|---|
| Standard · 4 ms | The same filters, with the audio held back a few milliseconds so the correction has a head start on sharp onsets. The one to mix with. |
| Master · 100 ms | Fully linear phase: no phase shift anywhere, and fine resolution in the low end. For mastering. A linear-phase filter rings symmetrically, so a sharp bass onset gets a little pre-ringing that the other two do not have. |
Your DAW compensates for the latency automatically. Only in Live is there truly none, which is why it is the one to record through.
5. Correction
Two paths do the work, at different speeds, towards the same target.
Shape — tonal balance
The slow, EQ-like path. It reaches twice as far as the number suggests: at 50 % it lands exactly on the target, and above that it pushes past it. So 25 % is “halfway there”, and 100 % is a deliberate exaggeration.
Compress — resonances, in time
The fast path. It follows what happens moment to moment: a room mode that rings on one note, a cymbal that keeps hitting the same spot, a vocal that turns hard on one syllable. It lets go as soon as the problem does.
Recover and Tame
Recover sets how strongly both paths move up — filling holes, opening up what is masked. Tame sets how strongly they move down. Tame works hardest around 3 kHz, where hearing is most sensitive and where harshness lives; that is deliberate, not a coincidence.
Both start at 50 %. If a mix feels closed in, more Recover. If it feels aggressive, more Tame. If you find yourself turning both up hard, the mix probably needs attention before this plug-in.
Linear or Musical
Two ways for Compress to move. Linear follows each band as fast as Speed allows. Musical spreads its work over a wider region and moves more slowly, so it stops chasing individual notes and moves the region around them instead. On dense music Musical usually sounds more natural; on a single instrument Linear is more surgical.
6. Target
Follow
At 0 % SPECTRA aims at its own reference curve: the whole tonal balance moves. At 100 % it keeps the balance of your material and only evens out what deviates from it. The default of 50 % is a good place to start; on a mix you are happy with, higher is safer.
Tilt
Tilts the reference around 1 kHz, in decibels per octave. Negative is darker and fuller, positive is brighter. Zero is the voiced curve, not a flat line — SPECTRA’s idea of neutral already has a shape.
Loudness
Mixes the equal-loudness contour (ISO 226) into the target. Our ears lose bass and top at low levels, and this compensates for that in the target. Turn it up for material that will be heard quietly; down for music that will be played loud.
7. Drawing your own target
Six nodes sit on the mint line. They do not filter the output; they change the target, and the automatic correction then steers towards your shape. That is why a node does not fight the engine the way an EQ after the fact would.
| Drag | Frequency and gain. Hold Shift to lock to the axis you started moving in. |
|---|---|
| Scroll over a node | Q — how wide it reaches. |
| Double-click | Sets that node’s gain back to zero. |
| Right-click (or Ctrl-click) | Its shape — bell, low shelf, high shelf, low cut or high cut — and what it aims at: stereo, mid or side. Also enable and reset. |
| Edge handles | The frequency range SPECTRA works in. |
Mid and side nodes only mean something when Channels is set to M/S. In L/R they are switched off and drawn grey, and they come back the moment you switch to M/S. Aimed nodes carry a small M or S, and the side’s line is dashed lavender.
8. Motion and stereo
Speed
How quickly a correction engages. It hardly changes how quickly one lets go — releasing slowly is what keeps this sounding like tone shaping instead of pumping.
Width and Bass
Width works on the difference between left and right only: the mid comes out bit for bit untouched, and the mono sum does not change at any setting. Above 100 % the sides open up, mostly above a few hundred hertz; below 100 % they fold towards mono. There is no saturation and no added harmonics.
Bass, the small switch beside it, adds two broad bells after the correction: +2 dB at 45 Hz and +1.5 dB at 15 kHz. Unlike Width it does change the mono sum — that is the point of it.
Link, and what M/S does
In L/R, Link sets how much of one shared correction curve both channels get. At 100 % they always move together, which keeps the image stable; at 0 % each channel is treated on its own, which corrects more but can wander.
In M/S the whole engine runs on mid and side separately, and Link becomes a balance called Mid · Side: at 50 % both get the full correction, turning left gives the side’s share back (at 0 % only the mid is corrected), turning right does the same for the mid. The readout tells you where you are: M + S, S 60 %, M 40 %.
Side channels are often nearly empty, and an adaptive EQ handed silence will happily lift its own noise floor. SPECTRA fades the side’s correction out when the side falls far below the mid, and brings it back when it returns.
On a mono track Width, Link and M/S have nothing to work on and change nothing; the correction itself works exactly as it does in stereo.
9. Output, metering and the limiter
Auto gain matches the level so you hear the change in tone, not in loudness. It shows how much makeup it is applying, so it is never invisible. Leave it on while you set things up; switch it off if you want the raw result.
Hear change plays only the difference SPECTRA is making — the processed signal minus the dry one. With nothing engaged it is silence, which is itself a useful check. It is the fastest way to hear what is being corrected rather than whether you like the result.
Limit switches on a true-peak limiter on the output, with a ceiling between −6 and 0 dBTP. It adds a little over a millisecond of latency, but only while it is on, and it never acts in bypass or on Hear change.
The meters show level in and out with peak holds, short-term loudness, true peak, correlation, and how much correction is being applied — cuts to the left of zero, boosts to the right. The dot beside the output lights red if you go over 0 dBFS.
10. Presets, A/B and undo
- Presets: the menu holds Default and your own. The arrows step through them, and the name shows “modified” as soon as you change anything. Loading a preset is one undo step.
- A/B keeps two complete settings. The first switch to an empty slot copies what is playing, so you always compare against something real. A→B copies the active setting across. Bypass and Hear change are monitoring, not settings, so they are never part of a slot.
- Undo and redo cover every move, including preset loads and A/B switches.
- Type any value: click a readout and type. Units are ignored, 1.5k means 1500, and a decimal comma works.
- The window scales and remembers its size with the session. The keyboard belongs to your DAW: the space bar still starts and stops transport.
11. What to reach for
On a mix bus
Standard, Follow around 60 %, Shape 25–40 %, a little Compress. You are evening out the mix you made, not replacing its balance.
On a master
Master, Follow high, Shape low — 20 to 30 % is often plenty. If you need more than that, the mix wants the work, not the master.
A vocal that disappears and then jumps out
Compress does more here than Shape. Musical motion, Speed a little above the middle, Recover up. Listen with Hear change to make sure it is following the voice and not the room.
Harshness around 3 kHz
Tame up, Compress up, Speed up, Musical. This is the region SPECTRA is most careful about by design, and the one where a little goes a long way.
Something too dark or too heavy
This is the one case for turning Follow down: let SPECTRA steer towards its own reference. Add Tilt to taste rather than pushing Shape past 50 %.
Build-ups, drops and breaks
Nothing to set. When the bass drops out of a build-up, SPECTRA notices that the low end went away rather than reading the music as thin, so it does not lift the empty space and the drop does not come back louder than the rest of the track.
When it sounds wrong
- Dull after correction: Recover too low, or Follow too low with a dark reference. Try Recover up first.
- Restless, pumping: Speed too high, or Compress doing work that belongs to Shape. Turn Speed down and switch to Musical.
- Thin low end: check Tilt, and check that the low frequency limit is not cutting into the region you care about.
- You cannot hear a difference: switch on Hear change. If that is silent too, Shape and Compress are still at zero.
12. Trial and licence
SPECTRA runs for 30 days with nothing held back. Your licence is a short piece of text with your name and e-mail address in it: click the licence line at the bottom of the window and paste it, or open the file you saved.
It is checked on your own machine, so there is nothing to activate, no server to reach and no dongle to lose — and the same licence covers up to three computers you use yourself. Updates within the same major version are free.
Lost it? Sign in at your account with the address you bought it with and download it again.
Still stuck? Write to us — we answer as quickly as we can.