KAUSTHUB RAVI & SIVANESH NATARAJAN
OPENING
Oeksound Soothe 2
Plug-in
ABSOLUTE TRIUMPH IN DIGITAL PROCESSING!
One of our favourite plugins, Soothe has gotten a major
upgrade! This plugin has undoubtedly been one of the most
important tools in our arsenal in recent times. It magically
allows you to take out or tame the harshness and edgy
qualities that are sometimes associated with digital recordings
and is usually the first thing to reach for if we need to fix a
less than stellar recording. The Soothe code base has been
completely rewritten. The plug-in's latency has been roughly
halved, to around 45ms. CPU burden is also reduced by a new
ability to set a higher quality mode for offline renders than
is used in real time so that you get the best possible quality
when bouncing your mix. This is a feature we would love
on more plugins that offer to oversample of some sort. The
interface has also undergone a facelift. It is now presented
in a more EQ-like interface that allows you to focus on the
frequency ranges that need it most. This makes it a lot easier
to use and lowers the steep learning curve that it had before.
This analogy has been developed further in Soothe 2, with
bands now offering a wide range of shapes including shelving,
tilting and notch filters. The entire plug-in or individual bands
can operate in M-S as well as L-R mode on stereo material,
and it's possible to freely weight the processing towards one
side of the stereo signal, both globally and per band. And
whereas the original Soothe was essentially a mid-range and
high-frequency processor, Soothe 2 can do useful work at
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the bottom end too. You can also specify attack and release
times to govern the processing. In the original, the response
was pretty much instantaneous: unwanted resonances would
be eliminated as soon as they started and for as long as they
lasted. The ability to set a slower attack time has obvious
applications, especially on drums. This should also help lower
any artefacts that may occur by lowering the attack times.
There’s a new addition of a side-chain input. Again, this has
several potential applications; for example, if one instrument
within an ensemble is sounding harsh, you could employ
Soothe 2 on one track, but trigger it from another instrument
thereby carving out space for the former in a mix. The biggest
development, though, is the addition of a second processing
algorithm. Soothe 2 can operate either in a Hard Mode, which
is similar to the original, or the new default Soft mode.
All in all, this plugin is an absolute triumph in digital
processing. The only limitations we found were the side
chain functionality is yet to overcome delay compensation
issues and the new version is not backward compatible with
the old one. So for existing Soothe users, version 2 will be
installed alongside the older version, which will continue to
work so that existing projects can be loaded unchanged. Small
compromises on an absolute workhorse of a plugin and we
cannot recommend it enough for professionals in the audio
game.