Strata is available at a special launch price of US$25 during December 2025. The standard price will be US$75.
Strata should be just one part of your monitoring of the music you are creating.
This page provides an overview of the categories of monitoring to consider, along with recommended plugins for each category. This is a personal view by Ross Williams who has no connection to any of these plugin vendors.
It's important you need to monitor the volume of your master track to ensure that your song is sufficiently loud. However, it's a bit more complicated than just a single number. These plugins provide a more sophisticated view.
Next is the spectrum of the master track. Keeping an eye on the spectrum and ensuring (if you wish) that you have a balanced spectrum is incredibly important.
A relatively-unknown critical part of spectrum monitoring is knowing about the "slope" setting of your monitoring software. When people talk about a song having a "balanced" spectrum, what they usually mean is that when you look at the loud parts of the song, the spectrum is mostly flat (or mildly smiley shaped). What they are often unaware of is that the spectrum display software is warping their view by applying a "slope" of S decibels per octave which means that it will show higher frequencies as louder than they actually are. With a slope of zero, a song's frequency spectrum typically looks like a diagonal line from the top left corner of the graph to the bottom right. Introducing a slope flattens it out, but what slope to choose, and why?!
The audio plugin industry seems to have standardized on a slope of 4.5 decibels per octave. This is what Voxengo Span uses. Consequently, when people say that their song is "balanced", what they usually really mean is that the spectrum looks flat when the song's spectrum is displayed with a slope of 4.5 db/oct. In contrast, I (Ross Williams) analysed several songs and concluded that songs tend to be darker than this (I might be wrong), and so when I'm balancing my own songs, I use a slope of 5.5 db/oct.
Monitoring the spectrum of the final result lets you know what you're producing. But it's useful to know what each track's spectrum is doing. You can just put Voxengo Span on each track but this means that you have to visit each track's plugin chain to see its spectrum, and there might be fifty tracks!
Multi-track monitoring software can help by showing you the spectrum of every track in your project in one graph. This is excellent for keeping an eye on everything. There are many benefits. You might realise that a track is extending right down to the low end when it shouldn't. You might discover that a pad track is playing during a section when it should be silent! You might realise that one track is much louder than it should be.
Next on the list is dynamic range. It's important to keep an eye on this to ensure that you aren't overcompressing your song. I use MAAT DRMeter Mk II and have found it great, but as a consequence, I'm not sure what its competitors are. Maybe you can find something better.
Keeping an eye on the waveform of your song is important, particularly in relation to the the kick/sub/bass relationship. It's also very important if you are doing automated volume sidechaining because DAW plugin delay compensation can sometimes cause timing problems that will be most clearly visible when inspecting the waveform.
Oszillos Mega Scope is like Strata but for the waveform. It shows you the waveform of multiple tracks at the same time. It's excellent for diagnosing problems reating to the kick, the bass, and the sub. I found Oszillos Mega Scope early on and didn't see a need to look much further, so it might be worth your while to look for competitors before buying it.
You probably already know the key of the song you're working on, but it's handy to have a plugin that can tell you key of someone else's song that you load into your DAW, perhaps as a reference. It might also be useful to have something like this if you are composing music that is largely atonal: you can use it to tell whether you're actually gravitating towards a key without realising it! :-)
It's a good idea to keep an eye on the stereo image to ensure that your song won't partially collapse when played in mono.
When mixing over several hours, it's easy for your song's mix to drift off into a sonic space to which you don't want to go. To prevent this from happening, it's a good idea to keep some reference songs handy so that you can compare your song with those.
There are, of course, endless debates online about various brands of studio monitors and headphones. I'm not an expert, but this is what I ended up with, and it's been wonderful:
Most rooms, untreated, have resonances and other acoustic defects that will mislead you while mixing and mastering. This is a complex field, and I am not an expert, but as a general rule, I don't think it would hurt to grab a room treatment kit and stick it on your walls. I deployed two Primacoustic London 12 room treatment kits into my room and it helped a lot.
Whether or not you performed hardware room treatment, you can use software room treatment to ameliorate some of the defects of your room in software.
The quality of the DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) you use is less important than the quality of your studio monitors. But once you've sorted out your room and your monitors, you'll be in a position to appreciate a higher-quality DAC. After some online research, and discussions with mastering engineers, I decided to get a Cranesong Solaris. It's hard to describe how it felt when I switched to it. The sound definitely improved, but not by as much as when I moved from consumer speakers to studio monitors. However, the difference was significant and I would best describe it by saying that there was more detail and the width and depth of the sound increased making everything sound more realistic.
This article has been a bit thin in places, but I hope at least it has made you aware of the different categories of monitoring that are available to you should you wish to avail yourself of them.
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