MASTERING · INSTRUMENTS · GUITAR · WORKFLOW

Musical by design.

Correct isn't the same as musical. Everything here is judged on real music first, every engine designed and tuned in-house, and the workflow built to feel as good as it sounds.

ELEMENTAL MASTERING FAMILY

The full chain, stage by stage: seven processors, the metering suite, and the console that hosts them all in one window.

WAVEFRONT, boxed
RELEASE READY
WAVEFRONT

Linear-phase and fully dynamic EQ, 16 bands with their own threshold and ratio, plus adaptive resonance suppression that only touches what pokes through.

GROUNDWAVES, boxed
RELEASE READY
GROUNDWAVES

Complete low-end control, head-bump saturation held within ±0.35dB, a three-band dynamic de-mud notch, and provably mono-safe width down at 40–60Hz.

TIDEWAVES, boxed
RELEASE READY
TIDEWAVES

Transparent glue compression in VCA, opto or vari-mu, with attack and release that track your material's own crest factor so it never fights the mix.

FIREWAVES, boxed
RELEASE READY
FIREWAVES

Mid-range harmonic control, blend even against odd-order harmonics and sweep a 400Hz–4kHz focus band straight onto wherever a mix turns boxy.

AIRWAVES, boxed
RELEASE READY
AIRWAVES

Three cascaded Baxandall shelves through harmonic saturation, gain-compensated so more air never just means more loudness fooling your ears.

SPACEWAVES, boxed
RELEASE READY
SPACEWAVES

An 8-line Householder FDN built for mastering depth. The reverb only ever adds, so your dry signal comes out untouched, and tail ducking keeps transients punchy instead of smeared.

REDLINE, boxed
RELEASE READY
REDLINE

Precision loudness, independent low/mid/high tape drive into a wideband limiter, with presence taming linked to how hard the limiter is working.

MERIDIAN, boxed
FREE
MERIDIAN

The complete metering suite, true BS.1770-5 loudness, real two-stage gating, and a matrix for hearing it the way a phone or earbuds actually will.

SMASH REFINERY, boxed
RELEASE READY
SMASH REFINERY

All eight plugins in one window, each module compiled from the real plugin's own code. Drag to reorder the chain and blend each stage wet against dry.

STAGE BY STAGE

The chain in detail, one stage at a time.

Wavefront, boxed
WAVEFRONT

Uncompromising spectral balance.

  • LINEAR PHASE, double-precision EQ engine, filter curves swap mid-drag with zero clicks
  • THE SURGEON, adaptive resonance suppression, touches only what pokes through
  • DYNAMIC EQ, 16 fully dynamic bands, each with its own threshold, ratio, attack and release
VIEW WAVEFRONT →
Groundwaves, boxed
GROUNDWAVES

Complete low-end control.

  • GROUNDWORK, mastering-grade head-bump saturation, gain-normalized within ±0.35dB so warmth never masquerades as loudness
  • DE-MUD, a three-band dynamic notch with double-precision filtering, dissolving mud automatically instead of carving a static EQ cut
  • WALL OF BASS, provably mono-safe stereo field on the 40–60Hz band, real low-end width that never costs you translation
VIEW GROUNDWAVES →
Tidewaves, boxed
TIDEWAVES

Transparent glue compression.

  • UNDERTOW, three mastering-grade compressor characters, VCA, opto, or vari-mu, with zero added distortion in any mode
  • BALLISTICS, attack and release track your material's own crest factor in real time, so the glue never fights the mix
  • DETECTOR, Lean tilts the sidechain's ear toward lows or highs, shaping the glue without ever coloring the signal path
VIEW TIDEWAVES →
Firewaves, boxed
FIREWAVES

Mid-range harmonic control.

  • HARMONIC CHARACTER, blend warm even-order harmonics against gritty odd-order, measured flat so it's tone, never a volume trick
  • TUBE DRIVE, a mid-band saturation engine recalibrated 10x hotter, unconditionally bounded so it never spikes or clips unexpectedly
  • FOCUS, sweep a log-mapped 400Hz–4kHz band with a live Hz readout, targeting exactly where a mix turns boxy
VIEW FIREWAVES →
Airwaves, boxed
AIRWAVES

Mastering-grade enhancer behind four knobs.

  • AIR STAGE, three cascaded Baxandall shelves (700Hz, 10kHz, 16kHz) through harmonic saturation, with RMS gain compensation so more air never means more loudness fooling your ears
  • TO THE STARS, a parallel enhancer that adds sparkle, centered in the image
  • SPARK HAPPY, puts real energy back into transients up top
VIEW AIRWAVES →
Spacewaves, boxed
SPACEWAVES

Source-matched space and depth.

  • REVERB ENGINE, an 8-line lossless Householder FDN built for mastering depth, not a wash, dense, natural, never smeared
  • PURELY ADDITIVE, the wet tail sits alongside your dry signal rather than running it through anything, so your master never gets coloured by accident, verified at 0 differing samples with DEPTH at 0
  • TRANSIENT DUCKING, the tail ducks up to 10dB under transients and recovers in ~300ms, so attacks stay punchy instead of smearing into the space
VIEW SPACEWAVES →
Redline, boxed
REDLINE

Precision mastering loudness.

  • TAPE STAGE, independent Low/Mid/High drive into a true three-band harmonic matrix, true-bypass at 0% so color is always a choice, never a tax
  • LOUDNESS ENGINE, a wideband limiter with blended fast/slow release, built to hit competitive loudness without ever sounding pumped
  • SMOOTH HAPPY, presence taming linked directly to gain reduction, tamed exactly when the limiter's working hardest, gone completely at rest
VIEW REDLINE →
Meridian, boxed
MERIDIAN

The complete metering suite.

  • LOUDNESS, true BS.1770-5 loudness metering, not an approximation
  • GATING, real two-stage gating, the same math a broadcast meter uses
  • REAL WORLD MATRIX, hear it the way a phone, earbuds, or streaming actually will
VIEW MERIDIAN →
Smash Refinery, boxed
SMASH REFINERY

All 8 core plugins, one window.

  • ARCHITECTURE, every module is the real plugin's own code, compiled directly in, not a clone
  • SIGNAL CHAIN, drag any module to reorder the chain, hear it differently in seconds
  • MIXING, per-module wet/dry blending, dial in exactly how much of each stage you want
VIEW SMASH REFINERY →

THE MASTERING DAW

A DAW built for mastering from the ground up, not a studio DAW with a mastering mode bolted on. Every Smash Happy plugin loads straight into it.

LATHE, boxed
IN DEVELOPMENT macOS · APPLE SILICON
LATHE

A mastering-first DAW, built for the job the big ones treat as an afterthought. Two stereo tracks sequence finished songs onto a timeline, two to four parallel summing buses each host their own Audio Unit chain, and a console mixer brings them back together. Import, arrange, process, and export a latency-correct master.

CAPTURE FAMILY

Creative sampling out in the real world. Record a sound on your phone using the built-in mic or a proper interface plugged into it, and it turns up inside the matching desktop plugin, ready to play. Four kinds of capture, four plugins, one free app.

Smash Capture, boxed
THE CAPTURE APP iOS
SMASH CAPTURE

Pick what you're recording and hit record. A stairwell, a snare, a rusted gate, the hum of a fridge. Through your phone's mic, or an interface connected to it. Trim it on the spot and it lands in the plugin that uses it: risers in Updraft, hits in DirtyHit, textures in Silt, spaces in Foundwaves. No exporting, no file hunting. Free, and it stays free.

Foundwaves, boxed
IN DEV & TESTING
FOUNDWAVES

Plays back your rooms. Capture a space, a plate, a stairwell, convolution reverb built on places you actually stood in, not a library someone else recorded.

Updraft, boxed
IN DEVELOPMENT RISERS
UPDRAFT

Plays back your sustained sounds. Hold one note and it builds a riser from them that lands exactly on the bar you asked for. No automation, no drawing curves.

DirtyHit, boxed
IN DEVELOPMENT PERCUSSION
DIRTYHIT

Plays back your hits. Trigger and blend the drums you recorded under a real performance, six slots, phase-aligned, replacing or reinforcing what's already there.

Silt, boxed
IN DEVELOPMENT GRANULAR
SILT

Plays back your textures. A granular instrument built from your field recordings, grain size, scatter and pitch spread across captured layers you morph between.

GUITAR & BASS FAMILY

Amps, pedals and dirt for players, a separate lineup from the mastering chain, built for tracking rather than finishing. Two plugins, one signal path.

No Stairway, boxed
ANNOUNCED
NO STAIRWAY Denied.

An amp and rig console on real NAM A2 capture, not a hand-EQ'd approximation. Dual-amp A/B rack for guitar, a three-band console for bass with per-band drive and voicing, four Rig Scenes on a footpedal, and a Tone3000 browser built in.

SmashBoard, boxed
ANNOUNCED
SMASHBOARD

Five original stompboxes on one board, led by Overgrown's fuzz, each in its own illustrated enclosure. Drag to load and reorder while the transport rolls. The pedals feed No Stairway, and the two hand the drop-tune between them.

WORKFLOW FAMILY

Companions to the plugin lineup, the small tools that get a session moving and a finished master out the door.

Reach, boxed
FREE
REACH

Turn any MIDI knob into a scroll wheel over the parameter you're hovering, in any plugin.

Dropzone, boxed
RELEASE READY
DROPZONE

Delivery and packaging workflow for finished masters.

PRICING

Three ways in: a single plugin, the whole chain, or the chain plus the DAW built to run it.

THE WHOLE CHAIN

$169 USD, Elemental Mastering Suite

All seven mastering processors, plus Smash Refinery — the console that hosts them all in one window, and isn’t sold on its own — and Dropzone, our delivery app. Bought separately the processors alone come to $343.

ON ITS OWN

$49 USD per plugin

Any single processor from the chain, if you only need the one. Smash Refinery is the exception, it comes with the Suite rather than being sold separately.

THE WHOLE STUDIO

Suite + Lathe

The full mastering chain and the DAW it was built to run in, together for less than buying them separately. Priced once Lathe is finished.

FREE FOR EVERYONE

Meridian, Reach & Smash Capture

Free, and staying free. No account, no trial timer, no upsell hiding inside them. Meridian is our full metering suite — LUFS, true peak, spectrum, correlation, the lot. Reach turns any MIDI knob into a scroll wheel over any plugin, and Smash Capture is the field recorder that feeds our instruments. If they're useful to you, take them, you don't have to buy anything.

WORKFLOW APPS

$25 USD, Dropzone

Delivery and packaging for finished masters: the last mile between a bounce and something you can actually send a client. Included free with the Elemental Mastering Suite.

Foundwaves, Updraft, DirtyHit, Silt, Lathe, No Stairway and SmashBoard are still in development and aren’t priced yet.

THE STORE OPENS SHORTLY

These are the real prices, not placeholders, and the plugins are finished — built, code-signed and notarized. We’re finishing payment processing, so checkout isn’t live for a few more days. Leave us your email and we’ll tell you the moment it is. One email, that’s it.

EMAIL ME WHEN IT OPENS →
HOW WE SELL

No 80%-off banners. No countdown timers. No spinning wheels.

We're a small BC company run by audio engineers, not a marketing department. We price plugins to be genuinely affordable up front rather than permanently "on sale," and we'd rather be in the comments and the inbox with the people using these than hiding behind a storefront.

Buy it once, own it forever. No subscriptions. We're not going to rent your own tools back to you month after month. The only time we'd ever run one is if a product genuinely costs us something to keep online, like a cloud service.

WHERE THIS CAME FROM

It started in a studio we built by hand.

Before any of this was a plugin, it was Smash Happy Recordings in Kamloops, BC, designed and built by us rather than rented. Full band tracking, vocal sessions, mixing and mastering for independent artists across Western Canada. Every tool on this site exists because something in that room made us want it and we could not buy it.

The studio is on hiatus now, still taking select projects while its long-term future gets worked out. One of those projects is capturing the room itself, measured and modeled into a reverb plugin, so its sound comes with us wherever it goes next.

SEE THE STUDIO →
GIVING BACK

Help The Kids!

$5 from every purchase goes to BC Children's Hospital Foundation, every year, and we'll show the proof. We're parents too, and we're driven to help families and children in need.