Canadian Musician - September/October 2020 | Page 23

By Adam Gallant
ROAD
TEST
Oeksound Soothe2 Dynamic
Resonance Suppressor Plug-In
I
first heard about Oeksound and its first
plug-in release, Soothe, back in 2017 during
a production seminar hosted by Canadian
producer Greg Wells. At that time,
the company was just in the beginnings of
its word-of-mouth success. Oeksound is based
in Finland and, since 2016, the company has
released Soothe, Spiff, and now, Soothe2 to
much acclaim. After years of relying on the
original Soothe in our studio, I’m very excited
to dig into this updated and upgraded version.
Soothe2 is a resonance suppressor; it finds
the loudest, ugliest, ringing frequencies in a
source and provides a vast amount of control
over how to turn them down. In this review, we’ll
touch on some successful uses of the plug-in as
well as some of the new and improved features.
In Use
One of the biggest hurdles in a production can
be preventing harshness. Often, our goal in a
mix is to give the listener the ability to turn up
the volume and be enveloped in sound. Too
much information in the highs and high mids
can hinder this experience.
Before the days of Soothe, a multiband EQ
and tedious automated EQing of harsh frequencies
were common ways to help soften
high-end information. The most common
example of this harshness tends to be the result
of bright-sounding vocalists singing into
bright-sounding microphones. Add in lots of
compression and saturation downstream and
things will get hard to listen to. Enter Soothe.
On a lead vocal, this plug-in tends to live later in
the signal chain to help “undo” some of the aggressive
mids that go along with conventional
vocal treatments. It has an extremely pleasing
way of sculpting sources and with this latest
update, it presents a lot more versatility.
A good starting place to gain an understanding
of how to use Soothe is by placing
the plug-in on your mix bus. Start by cranking
up the depth until the plug-in is very obviously
affecting the track, then hit the Delta button to
get a sense of how much content the plug-in is
reducing. Use the nodes to sweep around and
find harsh areas. Disengage the Delta function
and back off the depth while bypassing and
engaging the plug-in to get a feel for how it
behaves.
The plug-in
looks a bit like an
EQ. Moving a node
horizontally affects
the processing on
that band’s frequency
and moving
a node vertically
affects the amount
of reduction it applies
to that specific
frequency band (so
moving the node
up increases the
amount of reduction
applied). Also like an EQ, we have shelving,
bells, and notching nodes, all of which are
very flexible.
Aside from a lead vocal, Soothe2 is tremendously
helpful on snares that are too gritty,
cheap cymbals that have strange and out-oftune
overtones, as well as any instruments that
have a general lack of balance in their tonality.
By parking the nodes on problem frequencies,
sources can be leveled out and the job of mixing
becomes more streamlined and enjoyable.
In a recent mix at our studio, we were working
on a song with a short recitation meant to
sound like it was recorded through a phone.
Surely enough, the source had actually been
recorded over the phone to voicemail and
sounded like an over-cooked, watery, and very
harsh MP3. Soothe2 easily irons out all the really
ugly high mids while making room for the
intelligibility of the human voice.
From Soothe to Soothe2
For readers who are Soothe users and haven’t
taken the plunge to this latest version, the
time is now. The plug-in has been completely
rebuilt. Soothe2 uses less CPU power and has
twice the usability. The oversampling modes
help with transparency and a very unique feature
has been added to this update that I have
yet to see from other plug-in manufacturers:
the oversampling modes can be set independently
for online and offline processing. This
means that while actively mixing, you can set
the plug-in to be less demanding of the CPU.
Then, when it comes time to print your mix offline,
the offline oversampling setting will kick
the plug-in into its most CPU-demanding mode,
giving Soothe all of the processing headroom
it needs to behave as transparently as possible.
The GUI has been modernized with a resizeable
screen and very clear and useful help
tips. Its stereo processing features are on par
with some of the most celebrated plug-ins on
the market (I’m looking at you FabFilter). Each
node in the plug-in can work independently
on the left or right channel on stereo sources
and the output section can be altered to work
in left/right or mid/side stereo modes as well
as control the stereo linking of the detection.
Imagine a drum submix with a harsh hihat
on one side and a very silky ride sound on
the opposite; there is no better tool to tackle
that hi-hat than Soothe2. The new “soft” and
“hard” modes give a wider scope of control and
transparency, with soft being a more transparent
and simpler approach in most cases while
hard lets users hone in on extreme resonances
and energy build-ups. Lastly, the sonics of the
plug-in have also been improved.
Summary
As many of us are relegated to our home studios
at the moment, I feel there is no better
time to invest in modern tools. I strongly encourage
all of our readers to install the Soothe2
demo and do a deep dive; you’ll quickly wonder
how you ever mixed without it.
Adam Gallant has worked in all facets of digital
audio production, from music composition
to location and post audio for television and
film. He currently owns and operates The Hill
Sound Studio in Charlottetown, PE.
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