THE_STRIP 3
ONE LISTEN TO A WORKING CHAIN. ONE BUTTON TO A WORKING MIX.
The channel strip that mixes your whole session.
LIMITED INTRODUCTION OFFER
THIS IS WHAT MIXING SHOULD FEEL LIKE.
Why do I need THE_STRIP 3?
You know exactly where your mix dies. The vocal won't cut, so you reach for another EQ. Now the guitars sound hollow, the drums are suddenly too loud, and the low end turns to mud. Fifty plugin windows later you can't hear straight anymore — and the song you loved this morning is buried under its own mix.
Here's what twenty years of mixing taught me: a mix is only three decisions. What is this track? How loud should it sit? And who wins when two sounds fight for the same space?
So I built the strip that clears everything between you and those three decisions. It listens to your track and writes the whole chain in seconds. It gain-stages itself, so every threshold reads in real dB. And every instance in your session finds the others — the vocal's EQ pushes the guitars aside while it sings, and one button balances the entire session. No routing, no sidechain cables, no wall of windows.
You just decide what wins. That was always the fun part anyway.
FIFTEEN PRO MODULES. AND EVERY NUMBER TELLS THE TRUTH.
From input staging to a brickwall limiter with a built-in clipper — every processor a serious mix asks for, fused into one engine. Reorder the rack by drag, open a full-depth editor behind every card, and watch a live meter between every pair of modules show exactly what just changed.
And the numbers tell the truth: the strip stages itself to a -12 dB reference, so every threshold means what it says. The compressor reads in real dB of gain reduction — set -4, get exactly 4 dB, at any ratio. No more guessing what a knob actually does.
IT LISTENS TO YOUR TRACK. THEN IT BUILDS THE CHAIN.
Pick LEAD VOCAL — or leave it on AUTO — and hit LISTEN. SMART SETUP analyses the audio actually playing on your track and writes the entire chain around it: the low-cut, the de-esser, dynamic notches on the exact resonances it found, compression tiered to the material, the output loudness-matched. 63 profiles from KICK DRUM to MASTER LOUD, plus profiles you build from your own reference tracks — so it can chase the sound you're actually after.
Then it tells you what it did, in plain language and real dB. Every setting stays hand-editable, and one undo takes the whole thing back. The first ten minutes of every mix, handled in one listen.
PRESS M. YOUR SESSION IS A MIXER.
This is the moment you'll want to show somebody. Every THE_STRIP 3 and MINI in your session finds the others automatically — no routing, no setup, nothing to configure. Flip to the MIX view and you're looking at faders, pans, meters, solo, groups and loudness for your entire session, from any plugin window. It even works out which instances are your buses and your master. By listening.
And the mesh is the sidechain now. Your bass pumps under your session's actual kick. A LISTEN runs on any track, remotely. PHASE ALIGN lines up every mic that hears the same source — one press, sample-exact. The sidechain cables you've been wiring for years? Gone.
DECIDE WHO WINS.
Masking is the real reason mixes turn to mud: two tracks fighting for the same frequencies at the same time. UNMASK turns that battle into something you can actually play: your whole session, lined up in order of priority. Drag the vocal to the top, the synths under it, the guitars below, and everything steps back for whatever outranks it — only where they collide, and only while the winner plays. You're not carving EQ anymore. You're deciding who carries the song.
And kick versus bass — the oldest fight in the room — has its own answer. The DUCK moves the bass out of the kick's way rhythmically, below 150 Hz, while its top end stays put.
THE COMPANION YOU PUT ON EVERY TRACK.
THE_STRIP 3 MINI is the same engine narrowed to the essentials — input, low-cut, the network's EQ, compressor and duck — with zero latency by construction and a fraction of the CPU. Drop it on forty tracks without thinking twice, so the full strip on your bus has something to mix.
And it's a full citizen of the mesh: it gets mixed, carved, ducked, metered and learned remotely like any other channel. One license covers both plugins.
ONE BUTTON. A MIXED SESSION.
Press AUTO-MIX and listen to what happens. It learns every strip that needs it, unmasks the tracks, arms the kick ducks and settles the levels — tracks first, then your buses, then the master — until the sum sits on target. It works from your song actually playing: it listens, it never guesses. And one undo takes back the entire run, on every instance at once.
It's not the finished record — it's the balanced starting point you'd otherwise spend a full day building, delivered in the time it takes to play your song. You take it from there: drag the pecking order, ride the faders, promote whoever should win.
YOU DECIDE HOW MUCH IT DOES.
Some days you want the strip to handle almost everything, so you can just move priorities around until the song feels right. Other days you want to grab one band of the EQ and argue with it for an hour. THE_STRIP 3 doesn't make you choose a camp.
Everything the smart features do lands as normal settings — you can read them, change them, or throw them away. No black box, nothing locked. Use as much help as you want today and a different amount tomorrow; the whole point is that your attention stays on how it sounds, not on the technical setup.
WHAT'S ACTUALLY IN THE RACK.
No stripped-down modules. Every card opens into a full-depth editor — here's what's inside each one.
INPUT
Honest staging from the first sample.
±24 dB trim, click-free polarity flip, L/R swap, live metering.
LOW-CUT
Rumble gone, tone untouched.
20–500 Hz, true Butterworth slopes at 6, 12, 24 and 48 dB/oct, resonance control.
GATE
Silence without the chatter.
Transient-smart with hysteresis, band-limited detection with focus tilt, external sidechain with filters and listen, lookahead.
DYNAMIC EQ
Six bands that can move with the music.
Bells, shelves and cuts, per-band Stereo/Mid/Side/L/R, per-band dynamics up to ±24 dB, per-band listen.
COMPRESSOR
Reads in real dB of gain reduction.
Ratio 1–20, Clean/Opto/Punch envelopes, Peak/RMS/Hybrid detection, parallel mix, M/S, external sidechain, draggable transfer curve.
DE-ESSER
Tames the S, never the voice.
Split mode leaves the body untouched, range-capped reduction, LISTEN plays exactly what gets removed.
DUCK
Pumps and pockets, no cables.
Grid-synced, sidechain or Follow-Kick through the mesh; 13 note lengths, drawn recovery curve, frequency-focused ducking.
TRANSIENTS
Punch you dial in real dB.
Attack and sustain ±12 dB over real windows, contrast, focus, per-stream drive, monitoring taps.
MULTIBAND COMP
Three compressors, one glue.
Three full bands with adjustable crossovers.
STEREO
Wide without falling apart in mono.
Width 0–2, three-band widths, bass-mono, M/S gains, and a correlation governor guarding your mono sum.
REVERB
Space that steps aside for the song.
Per-band decay, wet ducking — the tail steps back while the dry signal plays.
DELAY
Echoes that groove by default.
Tempo-synced with 13 divisions, filtered saturating feedback, ping-pong, crossfeed, wow, wet ducking.
MOD
Movement from one musical LFO.
Chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo and autopan — free-running or locked to the grid.
WARMTH
Analog colour, gain-compensated.
Six models with internal auto-gain, bias and tone, tape hysteresis and wow, its own 2x oversampling.
LIMITER
Loud, clean, honest to the last dB.
Brickwall with a built-in zero-latency anti-aliased clipper, absolute ceiling, Transformer/Tube/Tape character, up to 8x oversampling, true-peak mode.
Between every pair of modules: a live meter with a gain-reduction pip, the measured in-to-out change, and ±12 dB of trim. Delta-solo on thirteen stages plays exactly what each module contributes.
I'VE BEEN MIXING FOR TWO DECADES. THIS IS THE DESK I ALWAYS WANTED.
Every mixing setup I've ever worked on made me do the same three jobs by hand: figure out what each track needs, keep the gain staging honest, and manage who wins against whom — with fifty windows and a spider web of sidechain routing.
So I built the desk I always wanted. A strip that listens and writes the chain. A reference level it holds itself, so every threshold means what it says. Instances that talk to each other, so the mix lives in one place instead of fifty. Now that it's finished, I can't quite believe myself what it can do.
The technical work is handled. The taste is still yours.
- ONE LISTEN. A FINISHED CHAIN.
- SMART SETUP analyses your actual audio and configures every stage — 63 profiles, plus profiles you build from your own reference tracks. One undo takes it all back.
- THRESHOLDS THAT TELL THE TRUTH
- The strip calibrates itself to a -12 dB reference. The compressor reads in real dB of gain reduction: set -4, get exactly 4 dB. It never changes your audio on its own.
- YOUR WHOLE SESSION IN ONE MIXER
- Every instance finds the others automatically. Faders, solo, groups, loudness and drill-in editing for every track — from any window, zero routing.
- UNMASK, DUCK, AUTO-MIX
- Order your session by priority and everything steps back for the winner — only while it plays. Pump the bass under your actual kick. Or press one button and start from a mixed session — one undo, mesh-wide.
- THE_STRIP 3 MINI INCLUDED
- The zero-latency companion for every other track in your session. One license covers both plugins.
- HONEST A/B EVERYWHERE
- Bypass is level-matched by default, per-stage delta-solo plays exactly what each module contributes, and the loudness readouts are always post-everything. No loudness tricks, ever.
- SAFE ON EVERYTHING
- VST3, AU and AAX on Mac (Apple Silicon native and Intel) and Windows. Tooltips in five languages. Every future update is free.
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WORKS WITH ALL MAJOR MUSIC SOFTWARE
MAC (Intel or M-Processors) | WINDOWS
VST3, AAX, AU
Frequently Asked Questions
THE_STRIP 3 works with any music software hosting VST3, AAX, or AU plugins—like Ableton Live, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Logic, GarageBand, Cubase, and Reaper. Both Windows and macOS (including M1 and higher) are supported.
THE_STRIP 2 was my channel strip with smart features. This one is a mix system. The strip calibrates itself so every threshold reads in real dB, SMART SETUP writes the chain from what it actually hears, and every instance in the session connects into one mixer — with UNMASK, kick-ducking and AUTO-MIX working across all of them. No routing anywhere.
No. Calibration is measure-and-hold: the strip only ever measures in short windows after you change something, then holds. Nothing moves unless you touched something — and anything it is about to rewrite shows a breathing ring first, so you always see it coming.
No. The instances find each other automatically — the mesh is the sidechain. The bass ducks under your session's actual kick, and UNMASK keys each carve from the winning track's real energy, live across plugin instances.
Then mix by hand — every module has a full-depth editor, the rack reorders by drag, and nothing requires the smart features. They write settings you can read, tweak or throw away. Undo covers everything, including a whole AUTO-MIX run.
It's the same engine narrowed to five stages — input, low-cut, the network's EQ, compressor and duck — with zero latency by construction, made to sit on the forty tracks that don't need the full rack. It's included: one license covers both plugins.
Only for what you actually engage — lookaheads, oversampling, true-peak limiting — and it reports exactly that to your DAW. THE_STRIP 3 MINI is zero-latency by construction: nothing in it can report a single sample of delay.
VST3, AU and AAX on Mac (Apple Silicon native and Intel) and Windows. And as always, every future update is free.
I'm super confident you'll love THE_STRIP 3, but if you discover it's not the perfect fit within 30 days of purchase, just reach out. I'll handle a smooth license transfer and give you a full refund—no hassle.
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