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11/08/2026

Nearly everyone builds a master bus in order, first stage through to last. Pete does it the other way round.

The logic is worth hearing even if you never adopt it. Turn the limiter on first, get a couple of dB of gain reduction so you can hear exactly what the loudness is going to cost, then work back through the chain filling in what's missing.

It runs against standard teaching, which is precisely why it's worth trying once. Does building backwards make sense to you, or does it break how you think about a chain?

10/08/2026

An honest admission from Pete: he built End Game for himself first.

Not for a market, not from a feature list. Just the things that annoyed him in his own sessions, fixed one at a time until he had something he wanted to use. The commercial thinking came afterwards.

A lot of plugins are made the other way around, starting with what will sell and reverse-engineering the tool to match. Do you reckon you can tell which is which when you load one up, or is that a story we all like to tell ourselves?

09/08/2026

Twenty years since he'd done any real maths, and no programming at all.

The sensible route was to pay people who could do both, so that's what he did. What came back was never quite the thing he'd imagined. Most people stop there and accept the compromise.

He didn't, and what he did instead took years out of his life. What's the one thing you'd go back and learn properly if you had the time for it? Send this to the person who keeps telling you it's too late to start.

08/08/2026

If you had to guess which part of End Game took the longest to build, you'd probably say the metering, or the interface.

It was the limiter, and it wasn't close. Two to three months on that section on its own, and a lot of those weeks went on reading research on limiter algorithms rather than writing anything at all.

Pete explains what kept him there. Does that kind of time show up in what you can actually hear, or is it the sort of detail that only matters to the person who built it?

07/08/2026

Here's a claim worth arguing with.

The thing that decides whether a plugin stays in your chain isn't how good it sounds in the demo. It's whether you can get where you're going quickly and get back to the session. Pete makes that case here, and it runs against how most plugins get built.

Plenty of people would say tone is the only thing that matters and everything else is decoration. Which side are you actually on? Tag a producer who'd argue the opposite.

05/08/2026

There's a moment most people will recognise. You push for another couple of dB, the meter says you got them, and the mix sounds worse than it did before you started.

The usual reaction is to go looking for a better limiter. Pete's argument is that the limiter is rarely the thing failing you, and that whatever went wrong had already happened before the signal reached it.

When a master needs 2 more dB, what do you reach for first, the clipper or the limiter? Show this to whoever taught you your chain order.

04/08/2026

“End Game does an effortless job of actually sounding final. Allowing me to walk away and be done.”

Boone McElroy (50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Sleepy Hallow).

That last phrase is the whole design goal: finish the mix, trust the result, and know when to walk away.

Try End Game free for 7 days at soundhiveplugins.com.

03/08/2026

Loudness isn't just another clip curve.

Hard, Punch, and Smooth give you different clipping characters. Loudness is built for a different job: pushing a full mix further while keeping the top end clean and detailed. Its engine is frequency-tuned, the knee manages itself, and Softness is fixed on purpose.

Threshold decides how hard it works. Drive adds warmth separately. In Mid/Side, you can run Loudness on the sides while keeping Punch or Smooth in the centre. It adds a small amount of latency, compensated automatically by your DAW.

Swipe for what changes, and when we'd choose it.

02/08/2026

This is a mix. This is the same mix after End Game, and nothing else on the bus.

No EQ pass, no multiband, no second limiter, no chain of five plugins each doing ten percent of the job. One window: the enhancer, the clipper and the limiter voiced to work as a single stage.

Of course the master is louder, that's the job. What matters is what it cost to get there, so listen for the things loudness usually takes: the front edge of the snare, whether the low mids stay open, whether the top still breathes.

How many plugins are on your master bus right now? Nobody has ever answered this with a small number.

Send this to whoever's running eight.

01/08/2026

So cool!

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