BRICK

What it does

A ceiling nothing gets past: a brick-wall limiter with a CEILING, a RELEASE, and a GAIN into it that is where loudness comes from. The last box on the master. The mastering chain's BRICK is this box at -1 dB.

GAIN is the loudness; the LUFS readout on the master tells you how far you went
RELEASE under 50 ms pumps; 100 to 300 is clean

Where it goes

PADSINSTRUMENTSCHANNELSBUSESMASTER

Four to a socket, in order: sound runs through the slots top to bottom. Open the box and every knob is in real units; BYPASS takes it out of the path without losing its settings; the presets are along the top; any knob learns a controller and gets an automation lane.

The knobs

3 KNOBS · REAL UNITS

Knob	Range	Starts at	Scale
CEILING	-12 dB to 0 dB	-0.3 dB	linear
RELEASE	10 ms to 1000 ms	100 ms	log
GAIN	0 dB to 24 dB	0 dB	linear

The presets

7 IN THE BANK

Every box ships with a bank. AS SET is the knobs as you left them; the rest are starting points, each a sound someone wanted often enough to name. Star one and it sits at the front of the bank.

Preset	CEILING	RELEASE	GAIN
SAFE	-0.3 dB	100 ms	0 dB
GENTLE	-0.3 dB	300 ms	2 dB
STREAM	-1 dB	120 ms	4 dB
LOUD	-0.3 dB	60 ms	6 dB
CLUB	-0.5 dB	50 ms	9 dB
BRICK	-1 dB	30 ms	12 dB
SLAM	-0.3 dB	20 ms	18 dB

The console line

Every box is also a line of the console's language, so a pad or a patch can carry its effects in text. The words are the knobs:

fx limiter ceiling=-0.3 release=100 gain=0

The rest of DYNAMICS

HOW LOUD, AND WHEN

TRIM

gain

Up or down, before anything else

GATE

noise gate

Silence between the loud parts

BUS COMP

compressor

Holds the loud back so the quiet comes up

SNAP

transient shaper

The hit and the tail, each on its own

PUMP

sidechain

Breathing in time with the track