Quick start
In your DAW (Live mode):
- Put Gild last on your master bus. Turn off any limiter you had there.
- Leave about 6 dB of headroom in your mix: the master meter should peak around -6 dBFS before Gild.
- On the Assist tab, pick a style, or leave it on No style.
- Press LISTEN and play the song from start to finish, or at least the loudest minute. Stop playback.
- Press MASTER IT. Gild analyses what it heard and sets everything up. Read the report on the right.
From a file (Song mode):
- Switch the song bar in the header from Live to Song, click Load and pick your mix (WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 or OGG).
- Press MASTER IT, listen with Play, and adjust.
- Click Export to save the finished master as a WAV.
The window
- Header: the song bar (Live / Song, Play, Loop, file name, time, scrub bar, Load, Export), the reference box, A / B, and the cog menu (look, window size, reset meters).
- Left: the spectrum, then five tabs: Assist, Tone & EQ, Dynamics, Output and Space.
- Right: the loudness panel, the 60-second history, the gain-reduction meters (Low, Mid, High, Glue, Limit), the phase meter, and the Coach and Report.
Assist
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Style | No style, or one of 18 styles. Each has its own tone curve, loudness and dynamics. No style is the average of all of them. |
| Character | Warm, Balanced or Bright. Tilts the tone target. |
| Loudness | Gentle, Balanced or Loud for your style. More has Streaming -14, Apple -16, Broadcast -23, Match ref and Custom (LUFS). |
| Ceiling | The highest a true peak may go, in dBTP. -1 is a safe default for streaming. |
| MASTER IT | Analyses the song and sets up every tool to hit your target. |
| LISTEN | In Live mode, records what plays through Gild so Master It has something to analyse. |
| Undo | Puts back the settings from before the last Master It. |
The Your target card shows the loudness Gild will aim for, the style and character, and the peak ceiling.
What Master It does, in order: trims the input to a standard level; matches the tone to the target in ten octave bands, checking and correcting twice; sets bass mono and stereo width; sets the multiband compressor from how loud each band gets; sets the glue compressor; picks a warmth setting; then searches for the exact push into the limiter that lands on your loudness target. If the target can't be reached cleanly, it lets the clipper take more of the peaks. Cuts can go to -8 dB, but boosts stop at +5 dB, and less in the top end, because a master that's too bright is the most common problem with automatic mastering.
Reference matching
Click the reference box, or drop a track on it, to load a commercial song you'd like to sound like. Gild shows its loudness, and Master It matches its tone, width and loudness instead of the style's. Hear plays the reference so you can compare. Click the box again to change or remove it.
A / B and the coach
- A / B plays your original mix at the same loudness as the master. Louder always sounds better, so this is the honest comparison.
- Coach watches as the song plays and warns about problems, such as clipping before Gild, phase trouble or a mix that's already too loud. Many tips have a one-click fix.
- Report explains every move Master It made.
The manual tools
Everything Master It sets is yours to change:
| Tab | What's there |
|---|---|
| Tone & EQ | The ten-band tone match and its Amount (0 to 150%); a mastering EQ with a low cut (12 or 24 dB), low shelf, three bells and a high shelf; Bass Mono (below a frequency you set) and Width. |
| Dynamics | A three-band compressor (split points around 150 Hz and 3 kHz by default), shown one band at a time with Threshold, Ratio, Attack, Release and Gain; and the glue compressor with Auto Release, Mix and a sidechain high-pass. |
| Output | Warmth (Tape, Tube or Console) with Drive and Mix; Push, Ceiling, Release and Clipper for the true-peak limiter; Dither. |
| Space | The listening modes (below), with Amount and Mix. |
Warmth, push and the clipper run at twice the sample rate. The limiter looks 2.5 ms ahead and checks peaks at 8x, so it catches the peaks that appear between samples.
Listening modes
The Space tab plays your master as it would sound somewhere else, matched in loudness so you judge the sound, not the volume:
- On location: Boombox, Outside the Club
- Everyday speakers: Car Stereo, Phone Speaker, Laptop, Cheap Earbuds
- Through a wall: Neighbour's Party, Upstairs Apartment, Underwater
- Old broadcast: AM Radio, Transistor Radio, Megaphone, Old TV
- Old formats: Worn Vinyl, Pocket Cassette, VHS Tape, 78 RPM
Use them to check your mix, then switch Space off before you bounce. They're also useful in film and video, for music playing in the scene.
Meters
The loudness panel shows integrated loudness (the whole song) against your target, plus short-term, momentary, true peak, loudness range (LRA) and peak-to-loudness ratio (PLR). The meter follows the EBU R128 standard. Reset clears it; start the song from the top for an accurate integrated reading.
Tips
- Master It works best on a finished mix with some headroom. If the coach says the mix is clipping, turn the mix down rather than Gild's input.
- For an album, use the same Loudness setting on every song and compare them with A / B.
- Streaming services turn loud songs down. Streaming -14 keeps your dynamics intact on those services.
If something's wrong
- Master It has nothing to work from: in Live mode, press LISTEN and play the song first; in Song mode, load a file.
- The master sounds too bright: choose the Warm character, or lower the tone match Amount.
- The master is quieter than expected: check the Loudness setting and the ceiling. A quiet style like Jazz or Ambient aims lower on purpose.