The work of a mixing or mastering engineer is meticulous to the last sample. To achieve the sound you want, each stem, bar, beat, sound effect, and piece of lyric or dialogue needs to serve their purpose in the mix.
Oftentimes, the process quickly turns into troubleshooting as the instabilities of audio sidechain your creative thinking.
oeksound
oeksound is a young plug-in company from Helsinki, Finland, here to improve your relationship with audio. Instead of crowding the marketplace with more of the same basic tools everyone has access to inside their DAW, we try to find new solutions to time-consuming problems.
Thankfully, technology is on our side and entirely new and CPU-heavy number-crunching schemes are available to us. We can already run email on a toaster, so why not run a complex signal processing algorithm on a laptop for audio production?
This was the hypothesis for years of research and development, which have materialized in our plug-ins, soothe2 and spiff.
soothe2
Soothe is a game changing plug-in! The amount of time I’ve saved using this thing is crazy. It does wonders for vocals, guitars... I even have it on my master bus at all times. I call it the tinnitus protector! No more hours of notching out frequencies or automating resonances out of the mix. Soothe has it all covered.
Guy Lawrence (Disclosure)
soothe2 is a dynamic resonance suppressor. It identifies problematic resonances on the fly and applies matching reduction automatically. This results in a smoother, more balanced sound and saves you from having to notch out the frequencies by hand.
soothe2 combines novel heuristics for finding resonances with advanced filtering techniques to minimise degradation of the signal quality. The process is free from pre-ring, crossovers, and summing artefacts commonly found in dynamic equalisers and multiband compressors. The algorithm has been carefully tuned by ear to provide musical results that are hard to unhear.
spiff
You can really affect the impact of the sound with this plug-in. Its amazing how it can accent or smooth the attack and release and bring out elements or push them back. awesome user interface makes it very easy to work with.
Maor Appelbaum, Mastering Engineer
spiff takes the principles of soothe2 and applies them on transient control. It has been designed to cut or boost transients with extreme detail. Similar to soothe, spiff analyses the incoming signal and applies the processing only on the parts of the signal that contain the transient information. This keeps the rest of the signal intact and free from side effects.
Presenting a new way of controlling transients, spiff opens up an infinite number of possibilities for sound manipulation. Even in more extreme settings, spiff retains the original character of the sound, without introducing any nasty artefacts. Remove all attack from a piano, turn guitar parts into a lap steel. Make a picked guitar sound fingerpicked. Remove the close mics from a drum recording. spiff is your one-stop solution for transients.
The algorithms at the heart of soothe2 and spiff are built by us, tweaking hundreds of hard-coded parameters to match the signal processing to human hearing. Instead of running the show on their own like some dystopian AI conspirers, they do all the leg-work while you make the decisions.
As a result, you can spend less time solving problems and more time focusing on bringing your mix to life.