Mystic aims to address a fundamental challenge by providing an easy to-use tool, super light on CPU that encompasses many essential components in one product, to breathe life into your tracks. The plugin’s main focus is to impart color and presence, delivering tonal results previously achievable only in top-tier studios with extensive high-end hardware - all within a single plugin! With Mystic, you can effortlessly shape your tracks, making them round, vibrant, full, and musical with just a few clicks. There’s no instrument, vocal, or recording that wouldn’t benefit from the magic of Mystic. Try it on your Mix Buss, and you won’t regret it. Its incredible flexibility, once applied, becomes irreplaceable!
Mystic consists of three incredibly streamlined yet impactful sections. A Pure vacuum tube Pre/saturator Module with High and Low Pass filters, an easy-to-use Baxandall type EQ section, and finally, a 'Frankenstein' optical limiter section greatly improved compared to the original module by adding extra controls to provide greater versatility.
Why did we choose a Baxandall EQ for Mystic?
Mystic is a versatile tool, perfect for tracking, mixing, and mastering music, but in our opinion it gives its best as a processor for the Mix and Master Buss, and so what better choices for this section than a Hyper EQ, which is extremely intuitive, adding brilliance and crisp airiness to your mixes without harshness, and achieves a fat, mud-free low end thanks to the low-high smooth, natural, gentle slope shelving filters. These EQ curves offer a wide bandwidth and minimal phase distortion, enabling drastic boosts and cuts without unwanted artifacts, like slicing through butter. This tool isn’t designed for radical sound sculpting, but it excels in enhancing sources with subtle and unobtrusive sweetening. In fact, there are instances where you might hardly notice it’s engaged at all, and we mean this in an extremely positive manner! This is our homage to the priceless legacy of Peter Baxandall, whose exceptional tone control innovation from the 1950s has gracefully enhanced countless hi-fi systems worldwide.
Undoubtedly, Mystic can be described as a vintage-voiced valve channel strip that seamlessly blends classic aesthetics with modern functionality. Inspired by the golden age of recording in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, it boasts timeless valve-based signal processing complemented by ingenious modern upgrades. The Mystic preamp stage is a faithful reproduction of the original gear, improved with our ultra-performing Hyper technology. The all-tube signal path of the desk is accompanied by custom-wound transformers both at the input and output stages. The challenge was to fully replicate the pre-amplification stage and saturation in its entirety, and we believe we have succeeded in this endeavour.
The dual-mono Opto limiter in Mystic boasts incredibly natural attack and release characteristics, preserving transients and taming even the fastest peaks. It imparts a soft and exceptional touch, particularly suitable for contexts that require a gentler approach, such as compressing vocals, basses, guitars, and drum loops. Additionally, to prevent the compressor from overly emphasizing sibilants during substantial gain reduction, we have implemented much faster attack times—almost instantaneous. Furthermore, the sidechain filter (from 50 to 250 Hz) plays a vital role in restoring the warm lower frequencies, acting as a powerful remedy for this issue. Its distinctive tone and compression behavior set it apart from others... not to mention that, to make it even more versatile and a true powerhouse, it has been equipped with two additional ‘customized’ modes specifically designed to guarantee more versatility, featuring a truly astonishing compression characteristics. These ‘custom’ limiters, designed to offer a fast and intuitive way to make mixes competitive without destroying their musicality and dynamics with harsh peaks, also adding a touch of ‘vintage vibe’ when used in conjunction with the preamplifier, while the sound of compression offers many facets, thanks to the different modes introduced in the plugin and a natural and smooth compression feel.
Let us reveal to you the behind-the-scenes..
In recent times, we find ourselves immersed in a realm of experimentation, a focus has been on enhancing preamplifiers in their ultra mode to achieve more precise saturation. While the classic preamp was admired for its light distortion, it struggled with noticeable saturation. This led to exploring AI and deep learning methods like Wavenets, but these had shortcomings in rendering high-end audio. Advancements in waveshaping techniques, exemplified by "Jam," improved preamp performance in Ultra mode, leading to a significant breakthrough named 'Fire The Gold.' This was static in nature, so the upcoming innovation called Hyper3 introduces dynamic, three-dimensional saturation that maintains transient response even under saturation. This innovation comprises two techniques: HyperPre3 and HyperSat3.
HyperPre3 uses FIR filters for high-quality transient distortion emulation, while HyperSat3 employs IIR filters for pronounced distortion and sustain emulation. These techniques combined imitate various harmonic distortion variations, offering better high-frequency phase management than AI methods like WaveNet. The new techniques promise remarkable cleanliness and potential for mastering purposes at arbitrary sample rates. They also provide variable saturation over time and program-dependent frequency, resulting in a more intact transient akin to the original hardware model.