GordonHighland.com

Last year, an old friend from my author circles asked about improving some mixes his musical duo recorded on his phone. They used an interface called an iZotope Spire, with minimal setup and automatic settings, so unfortunately all its processing and effects were already baked into the tracks I received. We call these full-track exports “stems,” which we can import/align in our audio software of choice agnostic from what it was recorded with. I used a ton of plug-ins like tape saturators, amp simulators, compressors, EQs, and maximizers, as well as time-based effects like (additional) reverbs, echoes, and flanging. One of the most useful was a transient designer to either shorten reverb tails or sustain other signals. No pitch correction.