New Music Gear Monday: FireSonics FireSpacer De-Masking Plugin

One of the main engineering tasks during mixing is making sure that you can hear every track element clearly. There are mixing techniques to overcome when one track masks another, but they can be tedious and take up a lot of time. What if there was a plugin that could do the de-masking for you? There’s a whole new family of intelligent de-masking plugins now available, the latest coming from United Plugins founding member FireSonics called FireSpacer.

The plugin is dead easy to use. Send the output of a track that you think is getting covered up into the sidechain input of FireSpacer, which is inserted on the offending track, then let it do its thing. FireSpacer will analyze the frequency response of the original track and allow you to subtract those frequencies from the new track so you can clearly hear both of them.

Intelligent

This is done via an intelligent filter with 4 modes: Spectral 1, Spectral 2, No Latency 1 and No Latency 2. The Spectral algorithms are more accurate but use a lot of CPU processing power, while the No Latency algorithms use minimum phase filters, which have a much broader effect so are less accurate and more likely to remove frequencies that don’t need to be removed. The large Amount control in the center of the plugin adjusts how many of the frequencies are removed.

There are several other controls that will tweak the result. MIN FREQ controls the minimum frequency to be processed so all frequencies below that will be ignored, while MAX FREQ controls the maximum frequency to be processed so all frequencies above that will be ignored.

Release controls how quickly the attenuated frequencies increase the level when they stop colliding. The higher the value, the less transparent yet more effective the collision removal becomes. Precision is useful only for spectral modes and controls how precise the plugin is at targeting the colliding frequencies. Maximum accuracy removes only frequencies that are nearly identical on both tracks. 

There is a large multi-colored display at the top of the plugin that shows both channels, to go along with Input, Output, and Sidechain level controls.

The best thing is that FireSpacer is available for an introductory price of just $16 (normally $75) with a 15 day free trail period. It’s also available for both Mac and PC in all plugin formats.

You can find out more here, or watch the short video below for more details.

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