By ADMIN
BIAS Master Perfection Suite
Even for musicians and producers who are not attempting their own Mastering, Bias ‘Master Perfection Suite’ offers some important simple production tools in a very flexible package. (from here on in I’m going to use ‘MPS’ to abbreviate Master Perfection Suite.) For the experienced Mastering Engineer and for users of Wavelab, WaveBurner, and BIAS own Peak, MPS offers a comprehensive suite of powerful Mastering tools, powerful enough for even the most demanding audio tasks.
The first thing to know about MPS is that you can download it and try it for free for 14-days. Many end users resist downloading trial versions of software, citing annoying dialog boxes, and difficulty removing the plug-ins after the trial. The benefits of a trial outweigh these minor inconveniences, MPS is affordable- but there is no reason to go into any plug-in purchase ‘blind.’
You can obtain any of MPS’ individual plug-ins singly, but the entire package will truly add a comprehensive suite of Mastering plug-ins to your Digital Audio Workstation software. The six plug-ins are as follows:
•PitchCraft: Pitch Correction
•Reveal: 7-in-1 audio analysis plug-in
•SuperFreq: 4, 6, 8, and 10 band Paragraphic Equalization
•GateEx: Gate And Downward Expander
•Sqweez-3/5: Linear Phase Multi-Band Processing
•Repli-Q: EQ & Spectral Matching/Balancing Plug-In
MPS is a cross-platform bundle, available on the Mac as AudioUnits, RTAS and VST, and on Windows as VST and RTAS formats. The plug-ins seem lean, easy to install and the Graphical User Interface of the plug-ins are easy to learn. This blog entry will consist of a mini-review of each plug-in, and then some positive and negative critiques and tips and tricks.
PitchCraft
PitchCraft is a very musical pitch correction plug in. While pitch correction is typically done during the recording process, or subsequently during mixing, having a professional pitch correction tool handy could be useful to any audio engineer who needs to analyze, correct or manipulate pitch in program material. When you instance PitchCraft you are presented with a user interface that looks like a musical keyboard:
From top to bottom, the user is presented with the following interface elements and labels (in Bold 
Ref. Source: ‘Reference Source,’ a way of selecting the entire stereo image as the source of the pitch being corrected or just the right or left channel. Only selecting either the right or left could be useful for pitch analysis (and pitch correction) of older stereo recordings where vocal content in on one channel and music is on the other, for example.
Pitch Range: This gives the user a musically useful way of dialing in the range of material to be analyzed. The choices are: Male and Female vocal, and the Lower Register and Upper Register of a musical instrument.
Settings: This is a standard convention in all of MPS plug-ins where the user can define four independant settings for comparison. These are different than presets, in that they are not saved from session to session.
Tuning History pane: This is a scrolling (from left to right in time) pane that follows your software when playback of the program material is engaged. Pitch is displayed along the left vertical axis from low to high. Simple press play and watch the entire history of your material in either Notes or HZ (hertz) - notes will most likely be preferred for most musical applications, but when precision pitch analysis of non-musical program material is required the HZ mode can come in very handy. Users can change the focus of the analysis by dragging the crosshair tool in the bottom left corner of the pane. The pitch history is charted as a graph showing the Input Pitch (in yellow,) which is the pitch before the plug in works on it, and the Output Pitch (in orange) which shows the effect the plug in is having. The Tuning History and the Tuning Meter are always active, the other panes can be bypassed independently.
Transpose pane: This gives the engineer a way to modify the entire pitch and formant of the program material. The Pitch slider allows the user to change the absolute pitch without changing the ‘formant’ – for instance, you can pitch a male vocal ‘up’ with less of a ‘gender change’ to female. If you *want* a gender-changing effect, or want to otherwise change the timbral characteristics of the material independant of the pitch, you can use the Formant slider. The Transpose pane can be altogether defeated using the green bypass checkbox in the upper left-hand corner. Concieveably, the Transpose could be most useful for sound designers looking to treat samples, or placed on an AUX send for a quick background harmony for a vocal lead.
Correct Pitch pane is the most complex of the panes. It is the area of PitchCraft that allows for precise correction of intonation using the familiar interface element of a piano-style keyboard. Users can define the Tuning in terms of temperment, or tuning system, Scale (Chromatic, major, minor, etc…,) or Key. Users can also set the Pitch Correction Time which allows for a delay before the correction sets in after the attack, for correcting just the sustain portion of the sound. Users also have a Detune control for fine-tuning the material in cents. The Custom Scale control is the actual piano-style interface which allows you to select or ignore specific notes in the scale. When a Scale is selected the keyboard changes to show the octave range of the scale, and orange dots label the actual keyboard key that corresponds to that note in the scale. If a specific note in the scale is not to be included when conforming the program material to the scale, users simply check the green Ignore checkbox above that note. After checking the Ignore checkboxes the user creates a Custom Scale which can be saved and labelled by clicking the Done button. The Reset button causes the Custom Scale keyboard to reset back to reflect the scale chosen by the user. The Keyboard can respond to MIDI if the DAW is setup to respond to a MIDI hardware device. The entire Custom Scale pane can be bypassed using the green checkbox in the upper left hand corner of the pane.
Tuning Meter is the element (represented vertically along the right…) that visually displays how far the program material is deviating from the user defined scale, higher values (in cents) are ’sharp’ and lower values are ‘flat.’ The closer to zero the more accurate the pitch is.
At the very bottom is the Preset manager, presets can be selected via a drop down menu or by scrolling using convieninet arrow buttons, users can also Load and Save their own presets. In the lower right hand corner is the Bypass button for the entire plug-in.
Reveal
Reveal improves on the metering and analysis tools found in many DAW software. It is actually seven tools in one, the Input Source can be selected (Stereo, Left and Right) at the top left, The display Resolution can be selected, the High value produces more accurate displays, but uses more computing resources, the Low value is more CPU efficient. The Global Freeze allows the user to take a snapshot of a spot in specific program material of interest and the Settings allow four convienient places to store setups for comparison. The seven metering tools are as follows:
Oscilloscope:
Oscilloscope displays a two-dimentional image of the program material in Decibels (vertical axis) and Time measured in samples (horizontal axis.)
Peak and RMS Power History:
This tool analyzes an audio file’s Peak and RMS (“Root Mean Square” or average) level history assigning different colors to Peak Left and Right and RMS Left and Right giving users a Peak and RMS Power History. The Vertical axis is a measure of amplitude in decibels and the horizontal axis is time in minutes and seconds.
Spectrogram:
A more complex metering tool, Spectrogram analyzes and labels the Amplitude of program material by frequency, frequency bands are labeled by color according to decibels, the vertical axis represents the frequency range and the horizontal axis represents time. In the above screenshot, the red color represents bass drums, therefore they are at the bottom, where bass drum frequencies typically ‘live,’ and they are red because they are the loudest thing in the track. The Analysis Window slider adjusts the zoom level of the display in milliseconds.
Pan Power:
The Pan Power meter gives users two ways of viewing the stereo image, in terms of Phase Correlation- how ‘in phase‘ or ‘out of phase’ the stereo image is, and Pan Power, a left to right time based meter of the right and left ’spread’ of the stereo field in terms of amplitude, left to right.
Spectral Analysis:
The Spectral Analysis spectrogram tool is another way of displaying amplitude per frequency. The Spectral Graph mode will be the most familiar way of displaying the frequency spectrum of program material as it looks like an EQ curve. The Spectral Meter choice allows users to see this same content more graphically like a meter. Amplitube is represented along the left vertical axis in terms of decibels and frequency is represented along the horizontal axis. Left and Right spectral content is represented independently by color.
Phase Scope:
This tool gives a graphical representation of in and out of phase signal in what is known as a Lissajous pattern, named after a French Mathematician who studied harmonics.
Peak and RMS Level Meters:
These are meters that continuously display amplitude in terms of Peak and ‘Average’ sound Power (RMS=Root Mean Square) in decibels.
End users can see all of these views in mini-windows by selecting the View All Displays tab:
By deselecting the green checkboxes in eash tab end users can customize the View All Displays tab.
SuperFreq
SuperFreq is a master EQ. It can be instanced in 4, 6 8, and 10-band versions:
SuperFreq has all of the typical settings you’d expect on a modern paragraphic equalizer: gain, shelving, frequency, and ‘Q’ – or the width of the curve around the center frequency of the band. Bands can be bypassed for surgical filtering, there are in and out meters and an overall gain slider. The presets offer a very useful pallette of starting points.
GateEx
GateEx is a useful dynamics plug in, acting as both a noise gate and a downward expander:
GateEx works oppositely from a Compressor in that when a recorded signal falls below a user-specified threshold, the signal gets quieter. Perfect for reducing background noise! When it fully reduces the signal it acts like a gate. Mastering Engineers could find this useful for reducing crowd noise in a live recording for example, or to edit tape hiss or vinyl noise for a resotoration project. When GateEx is acting like an expander it increases the potential to preserve the integrity of the original program material while lessining the effect of low volume artifacts. There are two main panes, the Waveform Display and the Graph Display. The Waveform Display is a time based graph that follows playback, and the Graph Display is a graphical representation of the effect GateEx is going to have on the program material based on the control settings. Most of the controls of GateEx are typical of a dynamics processor with the exception of Hysteresis, which allows GateEx to work when the background noise is more unpredictable, like at a live show. Depth determines how far the gate ‘closes’ when the program material exceeds the threshold, set all the way the program material is silenced. The Attack controls how fast the gate ‘opens’ and the Release conrols how fast it ‘closes.’ Hold allows the gate to stay open even when the program material falls below the threshold, allowing for more natural decays in the program material, preserving the natural performance. The Ratio control sets up a ratio between the amount of change in the input to the amount of expansion GateEx applies. Lookahead examines incoming transients, preserving natural attacks in the program material. The Threshold slider sets the level at which the gate kicks in, and Gain attenuates the output signal.
Sqweez-3/5
MPS includes a professional linear-phase multiband compressor/limiter Sqweez-3/5 which can be instanced as a three-band or five-band compressor/limiter:
Sqweez offers a ton of controls over each band, many of which are standard on compressors both hardware and software. Multiband Compressors add the extra dimension of dynamic control over discrete frequency bands. The Sqweez interface allows users to view a program material’s EQ settings, Threshold settings or both at once via the main Display pane. all of the bands have handle points in the Display pane which the user can use to grab and adjust EQ parameters, Threshold parameters, etc., or these can be adjusted in the Group settings below. The Group settings allow for deeper control over Ratio, Max. Red. (Maximum Reduction,) Attack, Release and Knee.
Repli-Q
Repli-Q is a type of matching EQ that is often very overlooked. Matching EQ’s allow you to ‘copy’ the EQ curve of a bit of audio and ‘paste’ it onto another bit of audio. This is useful for a bunch of things, maintaining consistency between performances in order to keep an entire recorded work consistent, for example. You can match a vocal performance from an older recording of an artist, and apply it to a new recording by the same artist. I like copying the EQ curves of material from loop libraries, that are excellently recorded and engineered, and pasting them to passages I’ve recorded, it typically gives me a better starting point than presets.
The interface of Repli-Q is very easy to get around, when you instance the plug in, and are playing audio through Repli-Q, you can use the ‘Learn Spectrum’ button to copy the EQ curve of the recorded material.
When you are satisfied with the result, you can then ‘Save’ the EQ in the EQ pane where the resulting setting will now be stored under the EQ Pane in the ‘Load’ drop down. You can also ‘Load’ any Reference file, using the Load button in the Reference pane, and this allows you to match the EQ of any file on your hard drive. There are two sliders at the bottom of the interface, ‘Matching’ and “Smoothing’ which controls how much of the EQ to apply to the program material, and also how ‘Smooth’ the peaks of the EQ curve are.
BIAS Master Perfection Suite offers DAW users a very powerful set of plug ins at a very good price, any end user interested in advanced audio plug-ins with easy to use and understand interfaces, should consider this comprehensive package. For the curious- there’s always the free trial download!
