Hey Gear Mortals, today we are checking out the Finality limiter plugin, by Joey Sturgis Tones (JST). Never heard of JST? Well, I’m sure you have at least heard of Joey Sturgis. If not, he is a world renowned metal producer and recording, mixing and mastering engineer. He has worked with bands like Asking Alexandria, The Devil Wears Prada, Miss May I, and many more. Throughout the years his mixing style has become pretty popular among modern bands. For years now Joey and company have been making plugins and products for all kinds of applications.
What we have here today is the newest plugin limiter from JST, Finality. There are 2 versions – Lite and Advanced. The main difference is the advanced has a much more parameters available to tweak. I spent about a month with Finality and used it with a variety of projects, ranging from pop to metal.
At first glance, Finality looks a lot like an LA-2A compressor/limiter. And while there are some similarities, there is a lot more going on in Finality. It has an Aggro option makes the release envelope better for drums, a color option that adds some saturation to the single, a mix knob that easily lets you do parallel compression, a lookahead button that helps you deal with peaks, and a sidechain option that allows you to have Finality be controlled by another signal.
JST sell Finality as being a versatile limiter and in my usage of it I can verify this claim. I used it on vocals, guitars, drums, synth, pretty much everything and I was able to get Finality to work the way I wanted it for each application. I found it especially great on vocals and guitars. On vocals, I was able to get Finality to be silky smooth for some of the pop sessions I worked on, and nice and aggressive sounding for the heavier metal sessions. On guitars, I really liked using it on clean and acoustic guitars. It did a great job of getting them to pop out, have consistency and still manage to be dynamic. It works great on distorted guitar too!
I also spent some time with Finality Lite. My understanding is that it is basically Finality Advanced with a lot of the extra parameters pre-set. I don’t know what they were set at but in my usage it worked well with most general limiting needs in my sessions. Its meant to be a much simpler and quick limiter for applications that don’t really need the deep parameters that the advanced version offers.
JST offer Finality Advanced and Lite as separate products. Advanced for $79 and Lite for $49. The value offered here is pretty unbelievable. At these price points Finality is the best value for a limiter plugin that is currently available. There just isn’t a limiter out there this good for this price. Hell, there aren’t limiters like this for even double the price! A nice plus is that it doesn’t need any dongle protection like an iLok to use. When you buy it they send you the install and you are good to go. It may seem like a small thing to consider but it does make the whole user experience better and in this day and age of dongle protection, keys, and DRM, having not to deal with any of that is a breath of fresh air.
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