Musik Hack on refining UI design with Master Plan

Tackling the scourge of over-complex plugin design whilst retaining the ability to mould your track to perfection, Musik Hack's Master Plan is a most impressive addition to our mastering toolkit. We spoke to co-founder Sam Fischmann about Master Plan and his personal concerns regarding oversampling....

Can you give us a bit of background on how Musik Hack first got off the ground, what motivated you to start this company?

Sam: “What motivated me to start was a really long journey. I was a composer studying academically when I fell really heavily into computer music. So much so that it really got me into trouble with the program I was in, because they were like ‘you have to notate something to pass’.

“I graduated and couldn’t figure out how to make a career out of music, but programming was something I learned how to do in order to make money. I wasn’t really happy making tools that didn’t align with my interests, so when Covid hit I hunkered down and started learning more about programming music tools. It was a way of marrying two separate parts of my brain – music and programming – that I’d kept in separate rooms for a while.

“Musik Hack was a random, lucky occurrence. I’d been going to production camps and I’d met a bunch of producers and worked on a plugin with one producer which kind of fell off. I met up with Stan Greene who runs a studio here in L.A. He checked out the rough version of this plugin. He liked the sound of it. So, we just started meeting up and then the company started around that first product idea. The ‘K’ in Musik Hack came because ‘Music Hack’ was already taken, and the domain name was way too expensive!”

cm: With Master Plan it seems like you’ve built an all-in-one mastering solution. What attributes does Master Plan bring to the table when compared to other mastering suites?