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Pro Audio

Techivation T-Clarity: a technical and creative tool for music

UK plugin company Techivation has released T-Clarity, a new plugin designed to clean the muddiness and boxiness out of your music. As well as that, we found it useful in many more musical situations.

Techivation is a company based in the United Kingdom whose plugins land firmly in the production and mixing world of music making. With their latest plugin, T-Clarity they have found themselves with a useful tool to clean up an instrument or entire mix.

T-Clarity presents as a simple plugin, but we quickly found how complex and useful on so many different sources it is. To put it simply, it’s a multi-band compressor. As used by some of the music industry heavyweights we put the T-Clarity to work on a few things that have been produced at the Happy studios.

t clarity

As mentioned, the T-Clarity graphic user interface (GUI) is classically elegant and easy to understand as you dive into the plugin. Across the top, it has a power button, A/B switch, and an in depth menu with presets, GUI window size, and oversampling rate.

In the main section, it has Output, Processing control knob, Level — that shows gain reduction, Intensity and a Diff button above that to hear what’s happening, Sharpness, Frequency range selectors from Low, Lo-Mid, Mid to Hi-Mid, and a Filter button that acts as a low or high cut depending on which frequency you engage.

I wanted to hear the T-Clarity across multiple sources so I loaded up a full mix, an Arturia bass line from their new Korg MS-20 and a bright distorted guitar. I wanted to jump in and start tweaking knobs and pressing buttons to see if I could improve on what I thought were great sounds.

mixing plugins

The first source was the full mix, and it cleaned up the mid to low end in the mix. The key to success here was being subtle, which is important in any full mix. The use of Intensity and Sharpness made some magic happen as it gave clarity (pun intended) to the low mids that were building up from the bass guitar and the keyboard part.

Moving on, I placed T-Clarity on the Korg MS-20 bass line. It controlled some of those runaway low notes, so again I found myself impressed by its use of the controlling low end. But I thought to myself, is this all it can do? No, no, no. With a few tweaks, I quickly turned this bassline into something more of an interesting production layer by selecting the Hi-Mid Filter.

After landing on a radio effect, I played with the Diff button — this disengages the Filter — and created a glitchy sound that was interesting. I’m unsure if the creators at Techivation intended the plugin to be used in this manner, but I was impressed with the sounds I was coming up with.

music plugin

Back to what is most likely, its intended use, I put T-Clarity on a bright electric guitar. With a light touch, this plugin contained some of those occasional high brittle frequencies. Exactly what I was hoping it would do. It reminded me of that annoying term ‘Fix it in the mix’, which the T-Clarity did exactly. But please keep recording as well as you can folks!

Overall, I enjoyed the simplicity in look and sound and the fact that I was able to be creative with it as well.

To get yourself a copy of T-Clarity head over to Techivation’s website.