New Music Gear Monday: Sonible Balancer Smart Plugin

In a world where everything around us is getting smarter and easier to use, why shouldn’t that happen with audio as well? There are a number of companies now making audio software based around artificial intelligence, and while there’s push back from older engineers used to doing everything manually, others embrace the new technology as a big time saver. A very simple plugin that illustrates that is the Sonible Balancer plugin.

Maybe a better title would have been Tonal Balancer because that’s what the plugin does. If you have a track that doesn’t seem to fit in the track or sound defined enough, you insert Balancer on the track, select the type of instrument (guitar, bass, vocal, for example), click the Learn button, and play the track for a few seconds. Balancer then compares it with an ideal track profile and tweaks the tonal balance.

You can adjust the sound further with the Sensitivity control, which is like a wet/dry adjuster. All the way to the left is bypassed while all the way to the right is maximum tonal balance. There are also 3 switches on the bottom that provide Neutral (the default), Warm and Bright profiles. That’s it.

By the way, this goes on each individual track, not the master buss. so don’t get confused. If you want you can put it across all you tracks, but I suspect most engineers won’t want to do that.

The best thing about Balancer is that it’s free! It works on any platform and plugin format, and if nothing else, will get you in the ballpark for further manual tweaking if you’re in a hurry. Sonible has also teamed with Focusrite to make this plugin available to its plugin community.

You can find out more about Balancer and download it here (again, it’s free), or watch the video below for a demonstration of how it works.

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