Recording - March 2015 - 60

Positive Grid Final Touch

By Mike Metlay

A serious mastering suite to give your iPad creations that... well, you know

One hesitates to use the words "mastering" and "iPad" in the
same sentence, but with the latest crop of high-speed processors
in the newest models, many things are becoming easy on the
iOS platform that simply weren't feasible in recent years. We
now have apps for full-on tracking, mixing, virtual instrument
composition, rhythm track generation, and signal processing,
and many ways in which these apps can pass audio to one
another, including AudioBus (reviewed July 2013, now in version 2) and Apple's own Inter-App Audio (IAA) standard. So
why not mastering, too?
There are two ways we can look at mastering. One is to see
mastering as a third-party process best performed in a high-end studio with lots of ultra-clean gear, by someone whose career is built
on bringing a fresh set of ears and a well-developed skill set to
each music project. According to that philosophy, it's advisable to
take your mixes to a mastering studio regardless of your own gear.
The other way to look at mastering is simply as the last set of
processes executed on a mix before it's done: adjusting its
dynamics, perhaps gently shaping its tone to fit in better with
other mixes on the same project, and other, more arcane tricks
like stereo image processing. It may be best done by a third
party in a dedicated studio, but we all know there will be times
when it's more efficient and cost-effective to treat a particular
track on our own, just to get it out the door... to give it, if you
will, a final touch.
What is Final Touch?
We've reviewed Positive Grid's apps in these pages before,
and been highly impressed with what they deliver. JamUp XT
(reviewed August 2014) remains one of our very favorite guitar
effects processing apps, regardless of platform, and the BIAS amp
modeling app is as much an education in how guitar amps create their unique tones as a way to get those tones in a portable
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RECORDING March 2015

format. So when Positive Grid states that it's about to release an
app for a purpose we'd previously thought the province of dedicated hardware, our policy now is to try before scoffing!
Final Touch is a modular audio processing platform for iOS 7
and 8, which combines a number of the most popular mastering
tools in one place, in a neatly unified interface format. It
includes a chain of six modules-Pre EQ, Reverb, Dynamics,
Stereo Imager, Post EQ, and Maximizer-which can be
arranged in any order simply by dragging and dropping their
icons on the signal path display at the bottom of the interface.
A quick tour
As you can see in the screenshots, Final Touch displays certain
panes of its interface at all times. Besides the signal path at bottom,
there are input and output faders with metering and displays of RMS
and peak levels at right, a waveform display and transport and settings controls along the top, and a global bypass button and access
to a menu of presets at bottom right. The central pane of the interface is what changes when you select a module for adjustment.
Each module has its own bypass button, a dropdown menu
for presets specific to that module (you can store your own, as
well as entire chains), and some form of input and output or dry
and wet level control and metering. All level controls, by the
way, have defeatable stereo linking for ease of manipulation.
Using Final Touch is simple enough in general terms: you
import an audio file, process it, and export the results. Imports
can be done from iTunes, Dropbox, FTP, File Sharing, Audio
Paste, or AudioShare; export offers similar choices, with Mail
instead of iTunes and Audio Copy instead of Audio Paste.
The modules
The Pre EQ and Post EQ modules are identical in layout and function. Each is an 8-band equalizer with full control of frequency,

Recording - March 2015

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