Inspiral

When the ingredients are there but the whole still feels disconnected, start here. Focus brings together adaptive tonal shaping, transient contour and spectral motion, with an increasingly pronounced effect as you turn it up.

The engine reads the signal’s energy, transients and stereo relationship, then makes bounded adjustments around your settings. Its moving frequency regions also follow an estimate of the low-frequency fundamental.

Listen for the relationship between the parts: the body beneath a hit, the detail around it, and how the whole mix moves.

Give a sustained passage a slow sense of motion, or explore a more animated texture. Rate sets the engine’s base speed in Free and Follow modes, from 0.05 to 8 Hz. Related modulation cycles move different parts of the sound at different rates.

Start slowly with Focus engaged. Increase Rate until the movement becomes part of the groove, then back off if it draws too much attention.

Free starts from your chosen Rate. Sync takes its base rate from the host tempo and a musical division, from two bars to a sixteenth note. Follow gives low-end activity a stronger influence on how quickly the engine moves.

PULL can influence the speed in all three modes, including Sync. Choose a tempo-referenced pulse, or let the incoming performance push the motion further.

Try Sync for a repeating sequence; explore Follow when the bass and drums should lead the response.

For the moment when the kick should feel like it is moving the track around it. PULL feeds low-end activity into the engine’s speed and, with Focus engaged, strengthens a transient-driven dip through the band above the bass.

The bass region is treated separately while that surrounding band ducks and recovers. This creates a way to explore rhythmic separation inside a stereo mix, without routing a separate sidechain.

Listen between the hits. Increase PULL for a stronger breathing effect; reduce it for steadier movement.

Reach for TIGHT when the low end hangs around long enough to blur the next hit. It reacts to excess sub and low-mid energy, damps the body between transients and reinforces the dominant body region at an onset.

That combination lets you shape the contrast between impact and sustain. A little can bring definition; larger moves deliberately reshape the low end.

Listen to the kick’s front edge and the space before the next hit. Stop before the foundation becomes too lean.

When the rhythm has the right shape but needs more physical presence, PHAT builds low-frequency body with upward compression and adaptive sub synthesis.

The sub generator follows the strongest region in its bass analysis and responds to incoming energy and new hits. It adds a shaped low-end layer rather than a fixed bass boost alone.

Bring up PHAT for weight, then use TIGHT to refine the contour. Judge the pair together on the material you are playing.

For a mix that feels a little too bare or hard-edged. TAPE blends band-limited harmonic colour with a gentle low-mid lift, a softened upper shelf and stereo-linked rounding on strong peaks.

It sits before the main shaping stages, so that warmer texture becomes part of what the rest of Inspiral works with.

Listen for richer body and softer edges. Use less when attack and clean detail are the priority.

Keep the bass foundation more centred while leaving room for stereo detail above it. MONO progressively reduces low-frequency side information; as it rises, the affected region extends higher.

It is useful when wide bass is distracting from the centre of a mix or live set. It gives you control over that foundation, rather than promising the same result on every sound system.

Compare in mono as well as stereo. Find the point where the foundation feels settled without narrowing more of the music than you want.

When hats, cymbals or upper-mid attacks start demanding too much attention, HARSH responds to fast changes in those regions. At higher settings, it also brings in broader high-frequency control.

Set it on the busiest passage. Listen for less bite while keeping the articulation you want.

Some sounds dominate because energy gathers in one part of the spectrum. RESO compares energy across ten bands and attenuates regions that protrude relative to their neighbours and the wider balance.

Hold and release behaviour lets the reduction respond over time. Use it to explore a smoother relationship between sustained tones and the rest of the mix.

Listen for ringing or a persistent tonal edge settling back. Keep enough of the original peak character for the sound to remain expressive.

HARSH addresses upper-frequency bite; RESO addresses concentrated spectral energy. Linking them adjusts their combined strength and reduces overlapping resonance reduction in the upper bands as HARSH increases.

Try the linked response when a dense passage needs both controls, then compare it with independent adjustment.

Move toward DEEP to emphasise low-frequency weight and soften the brighter body of the sound. Move toward BRIGHT to lift presence and ease some low-end weight.

This broad tonal balance is separate from AIR, so you can shape the body and presence before deciding how much top-end openness to add.

Find the balance that suits the passage: more grounding for a sparse section, more presence when the arrangement grows.

Lift the highest detail after harshness and resonance control, or soften a top end that feels too exposed. Positive AIR adds a high shelf around 10 kHz; negative AIR blends toward a low-pass response in that region.

Listen to the shimmer and tail of percussion. Open it until the mix feels inviting, or turn it down for a softer, closer atmosphere.

Pull the stereo field inward for intimacy, or open it out for immersion. Above its neutral width setting, SPACE also introduces filtered, modulated delay and cross-fed ambience.

The motion path is filtered above the low end, while MONO gives you separate control over the bass foundation. Focus can contribute spatial processing too, so listen to their interaction.

Try opening SPACE across a sustained transition, then bring it back when you want the next section to feel more direct. Check the result in mono.

INPUT sets the level entering the processing stages. It changes how strongly level-sensitive stages are driven, making it useful when sources arrive at different levels or you want a more restrained response.

Set INPUT for the behaviour you want, then use OUTPUT to judge the result at a comparable listening level.

OUTPUT adjusts the processed level before Inspiral’s final limiting stage. Use it to leave headroom or place the result in your session; pushing it harder can engage more limiting.

Watch the output meters as you turn it. More level can change the dynamics as well as the volume.

With Focus engaged, Auto Gain uses a smoothed comparison of dry and processed energy to reduce level differences. Bypass lets you return to the untreated signal through the compensated signal path.

Auto Gain is a listening aid, not an exact perceptual loudness match. Fine-tune the level by ear and compare the texture, separation and movement.

Inspiral’s Spiral automatic limiter adapts its release and limiting pressure using the signal’s transient activity, peak-to-average level, low-end weight, stereo correlation and recent gain reduction. Its timing moves between fast recovery and a longer release as those conditions change.

The processed path uses stereo-linked gain reduction, reconstructed true-peak detection and approximately 5 ms of lookahead, with a fixed −0.1 dBTP target ceiling and an internal safety margin. OUTPUT feeds this stage, so driving it harder can change dynamics as well as level.

Watch the loudness and true-peak meters and listen to the attack and recovery of each hit. The limiter controls peaks; it does not choose a target LUFS value for you.