Time to show some love to those mix-fixing plugins that offered genuinely inspired routes to caress our frequencies and tame our tracks

While we all love our effects, softsynths and beatmakers, when it comes to the crunch we ultimately spend more time alongside our trusted workhorse mixing tools, working long into the night trying to get the perfect balance of elements. While in the past we’d approach each process individually, from EQing, compression, limiting etc, this year has seen a flurry of products that instantly yield topnotch results across numerous mixing situations. Foremost in our mind is LOLCOMP by Mixing Night Audio. The second release from the company that was birthed from the mighty Grammy-winning producer Ken Lewis’s ‘Mixing Nights’, what the MNA team managed to concoct was nothing short of miraculous for resolving many of our mixing headaches. Its five curated chains for fixing and caressing different elements of the mix, as well as its uniquely intuitive (and ‘gamified’) UI made it stand above many of its contemporaries. As opposed to other compressors and processing tools, LOLCOMP allowed you to remain completely in a creative headspace while still applying some deft compression chains, as used on many of Ken’s Grammy-nominated releases.