Masks

A mask doesn’t change the audio — it picks out the region you want to work on, so the next node in the chain only acts on that selection. Pull out everything between 200 Hz and 2 kHz with Frequency Band Mask. Isolate just the loudest peaks of a buffer with Amplitude Mask. Combine frequency, time, and amplitude criteria in one go with Unified Mask. Masks are the equivalent of selecting a region in an image editor before applying a filter — they convert “process the whole buffer” into “process exactly this part of it.” Useful upstream of any destructive node when you want surgical targeting rather than global treatment.