Buy outright: $79 ($59 introductory price)
Rent to own: $6.60 / month for 12 months ($5 introductory price)
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Musik Hack made waves with its first plugin, Master Plan in 2024, praised for its simple, intuitive controls and loud, transparent sound. The brand is the brainchild of Grammy-nominated producer Stan Greene and composer/developer Sam Fischmann, and its new plugin crams a wealth of loudness and saturation know-how into a single, simple-to-use package.
Fuel combines several go-to loudness processes including clipping, compression, saturation and limiting into a single plugin with stripped-back controls. What it lacks in precision and visual feedback, it makes up for in speed and sonic quality.
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What does Music Hack Fuel do?
Fuel’s controls are presented more like hardware than a complex, modern plugin. Although there’s plenty going on beneath the surface to make sure each parameter functions smoothly and effectively, you essentially have one dial or slider for each section.
At its core is the Loud dial, which uses the same proprietary algorithm from MasterPlan. This combines a clipper and a limiter that reacts to the incoming signal to create loud and transparent audio at moderate settings. When pushed harder, you start to hear more crunch on the peaks, but it keeps the punch and groove of the material intact with little-to-no pumping.
Alongside the Loud dial are six controls that shape the sound.
First up is a Compressor dial that can be switched between a program-dependent, broadband compressor with fast attack and release and no pumping, or an aggressive OTT (over the top) multiband effect. They are dramatically different, with the broadband compressor adding more transparent thickness and transient control whilst retaining the punch.
The OTT, on the other hand, smashes the sound, balancing the spectrum and bringing up tail sustain and top-end noise. Both can work well at extreme settings in conjunction with the Mix dial, used to reintroduce part of the dry signal. Below the compressor is a single slider labelled Body. This adds gentle upward compression to help bring up low-level material without affecting the peaks.
At the bottom of the interface, two saturators add weight and thickness to the sound. The Bass dial focuses on low harmonics, with a saturation tuned to around 80 Hz for analogue-sounding warmth and sub-bass heft. Thick, however, adds lovely broadband saturation, where values over 60% will start to focus the energy in the mid-range. There’s also a progressive widening effect with Thick that increases alongside the saturation percentage. This is perhaps my favourite part of the plugin; it can single-handedly give full mixes a polished and radio-ready sound, bringing the upper-mids to life and establishing an immersive sense of stereo space.
The final section is a soft clipper that tames peaks and adds colour and energy. Modest amounts are relatively transparent, but it saturates more quickly on heavy material. Below the clipper is a Crunch slider, which is the most aggressive processor, capable of fuzz distortion when pushed. Thankfully, both Soft Clip and Crunch offer pleasing and lively distortions, making them useful as creative effects. The only downside is that there’s no metering to indicate just how hard you’re hitting the clipper or in fact any of the processors. Yes, it’s a plugin that encourages you to listen carefully and use your ears, but it would be beneficial to have extra meters to let you know just how hard the compressor, Loud dial and clipper are working; this would help you make more informed decisions. There is, at least, a LUFS level read-out below the Input and Output dials, which gives an indication of the quantity of extra volume you’re squeezing out of your audio.
To help with levels there’s a Unity button – a really useful volume-match function so you can better hear the squashing effects of the processors. There’s also a latency-free Bypass, a welcome Oversample option, and a Live Mode that sacrifices quality for lower levels of latency. Live Mode could help make Fuel a great option as a one-stop loudness booster for live sets, or for adding vibe whilst tracking.
There is a small collection of presets, although, given Fuel’s simplicity, you’ll likely get better results by fine-tuning it to your material. And somewhat unusually for a processor of this type, there’s also a Randomise button. Although it doesn’t make a difference to the excellent sound, the user interface looks a little cheap, however, you can at least change the colour and pattern of the background and the window is freely resizable.
How does Music Hack Fuel compare to competitors?
I test Fuel against a bunch of other loudness saturation-type plugins. At reasonable levels of reduction, it doesn’t necessarily stand out, but it holds its own. However, when I crank all the plugins to get serious peak reduction and additional volume, it starts to shine. Sonnox Inflator, for its age, manages to retain transient peaks in the cleanest way at lower levels, but it starts to lose low frequencies when pushed too hard. BlackBox HG-2MS and Soundtheory’s Kraftur also sound decent at low levels, but the saturation is far more obvious when cranked loud.
The only plugin with comparable results to Fuel is iZotope Ozone’s Maximizer. Overall though, Fuel comes out sounding the cleanest and most balanced, albeit still with expected colouration. Don’t expect this to be totally transparent, as it will colour the sound when pushed loud, but it’s the tightest and best-sounding of the processors we try when it comes to extreme loudness.
Should I buy Music Hack Fuel?
As engineer David Gnozzi of MixbusTv mentions in his YouTube video, it’s clear that Fuel has been created and fine-tuned by musicians and engineers, as it’s quick and easy to get solid results.
If you’re a producer who likes deep control, however, then this probably won’t be for you. The lack of metering may lead to unintended over-processing, but ultimately, it’s up to you to listen and learn what sounds right. Fuel is somewhat subtle at low settings and when used in parallel, but it’s clear it shines best on tracks and genres where loudness and saturation are a key ingredient of the sound.
A small percentage of the Thick dial adds instant improvement to any mix, while all the different processors interact to massage out additional volume wherever needed, whether that be on individual tracks or across the mix bus.
Despite its operational and visual simplicity, Fuel is a surprisingly classy plugin that’s reasonably priced for the sheer quality and variety of results it’s capable of.
Key features
- Maximisation and saturation plugin (VST3, AU and AAX)
- Uses the Maximizer algorithm from Master Plan
- Broadband compression, OTT multiband compression and upwards compression
- Soft and crunch clippers
- Oversampling, unity gain monitoring, and latency-free bypass
- Low-latency mode for tracking and live use
