New Music Gear Monday: Joey Sturgis Tones Finality Limiter

There are a lot of compressor/limiter plugins available, but after a while they all begin to sound the same. For the most part, most try to emulate an existing hardware unit, which some do better than others. There is still room for another limiter, however, especially if the thinking behind it is different, which is exactly what describes JST's new Finality.

Joey Sturgis Tones Finality takes limiting to the next level with some really well-thought out features, a great sound, and reasonable price. It has all the standard parameter controls like input level, release, threshold, output, meter control and gain, plus a few others that you don't see often, if at all.

One of the cooler things that it has is a Look Ahead control that allows the plug to anticipate loud peaks before they cause a problem. This is something that mastering compressor/limiters have had for what seems like eons, but you don't see often in limiters that you used on individual tracks.

There's an Agro button that changes the release envelope to one specifically for drums (it works great, by the way), and the Color button adds a pleasing saturation sound with the amount determined by the Threshold level. There's also a Hard/Soft switch that again changes the release envelope and determines how agressive the sound will be.

There's also a built-in Sidechain High-Pass Filter with an on-off switch, frequency control and monitor switch, so you can set how the limiter reacts to low end of the track. An Auto-Gain switch automatically controls the amount of make-up gain added (love this), and a Mix control mixes between the uncompressed and compressed signals, which basically adds parallel compression without the need for extra channels and setup (why doesn't every plug have this?).

I loved the sound of Finality on drums, especially the kick, where it gave it some added girth without having to do much tweaking at all. Works great on bass and guitars as well, and I'm sure I'll find more uses for it over time, as I've found it to work in almost any situation so far, unlike many other similar products.

Finality is available direct from Joey Sturgis Tones for $79 for the Advanced version, and just $49 for the simpler yet still effective Lite version. There's also a limited demo version available.

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