Clicking on a band’s node in the graphical display and dragging it upwards tells Soothe to do more work in that region, while dragging a node downwards tells it to leave that frequency range alone. Two of the bands are tied to the top and bottom of the frequency range, while the remaining three bands you use to pinpoint areas that you want Soothe to target. Soothe has a real-time graphical display that enables you to steer the processing more towards certain frequency regions, and has a master ‘depth’ control that governs the overall amount of ‘resonance suppression’ applied.īroadly speaking, it offers five bands of processing, with each band having separate controls for frequency, bandwidth and sensitivity. Just slapping the plug-in on a track often works surprisingly well, but after a brief look at the manual, you quickly begin to get a feel for how to use it in a more focused way. Quite how it is achieved remains slightly mysterious but it is, apparently, the result of seven years’ R&D, and employs a proprietary process that introduces minimal artifacts. Oeksound claim it has the potential to offer much more natural results than manual EQ or broader multiband compression. Oeksound have developed an algorithm that can automatically identify these problem areas in a source and, rather than imposing fixed EQ, Soothe applies attenuation dynamically as and when it’s needed. Identifying areas of the sound that contain unpleasant resonances and removing them can introduce a smoothness to a vocal, and can also allow you to get a bit more heavy handed with tone-changing EQ or compression if required.

When mixing vocals, it can often be effective to ‘notch out’ a few specific frequencies with very narrow-bandwidth parametric EQ bands. As I’ve spent a bit of time with Soothe, however, I’ve developed more of an understanding of, and appreciation for, just what a useful tool it can be.įinnish company Oeksound say that Soothe started out as a vocal processing tool, and describe it as a “dynamic resonance suppressor for mid and high frequencies”. On both occasions, though, I didn’t really understand what it was doing! I didn’t have to change any of the parameters, and although I enjoyed the results, I do like to know what it is that something is contributing, so that I don’t become reliant on a mysterious tool - even if that tool does make mixing a bit easier.

I liked what it did when I threw it on a vocal that was sounding a bit harsh, and I was also amazed at what it did to some nasty-sounding cymbals on a drum kit I was mixing. When I first started using the Soothe plug-in, I’ll admit to having mixed feelings.

Oeksound soothe crack