No, the point is: sometimes you have a perfectly fine e.g. vocal. And if you use e.g. Silk Vocal, it's going to make your Vocal sound gradually more and more like the bad example I showed. In some cases maybe there is a sweetspot, where the dry signal sounds worse than one somewhat flattened out and therefore with a reduced noise to harmonics ratio, but in the video I just wanted to question whether this is really the best approach. It does work in some cases, but to me it seems a bit flawed overall. So seeing a new approach I think is very nice!
Silk Vocal is great for managing loud frequencies without removing natural harmonics. It only highlights ugly frequencies if pushed too far, similar to any EQ. It’s an automatic EQ tailored for voice, handling issues like a singer moving too close to the mic or having a harsh upper range that needs to be dealt with. It's very effective between 0-34%, making it super helpful without pushing unnatural frequencies.
Great video, some very good points made. The final tool used reminds me also of Reso by mastering the mix. One thing I notice is that people seem to be confused as to what exactly they want - Boosting fundamentals and harmonics with scaler EQ and tape/tube emulations, and then taming the same peaks with heavy handed soothe2 and other none selective resonance suppressors. I think the old school method of individually choosing which peaks to suppress, which to leave and which to boost will always give the best results!
Thank you! I feel that the marketing of e.g. smooth operator and silk vocal really isn't helping this confusion because i feel they're basically advertising to remove "bad" frequencies automatically, when they don't even seem to have any tech to differentiate between "good" and "bad" frequencies. I definitely agree that more manual approaches are probably still the way to go in many cases...
All new stuff that are coming out are doing nothing but decrease the skills we need to develop thru experimentation. Basically with Eq Compression Space and Distortion/Saturation that’s all we need
interesting plugin, I think it might have the same issue I have with Smoothe2, where I end up removing the part of the sound that I liked without realizing it
dynamic resonance surpression plugins like soothe2 only make sense when you need to decrease the signal-to-noise ratio, meaning there's more noise. the concept of that is that noise is pleasant. maybe not white noise, but pink noise is already so pleasant that it's often used to gain match things, and natural noise like rain, wind, waves or the chchchchch-part of the vocals can also be considered pleasant noise if you are going for that sound. consider that it can be hard to make a vocal cut through the mix when it mostly consists of nice overtones, as that doesn't only sound nice and warm in solo, but also muddy. the signal-to-noise ratio perspective is a constant battle between the beauty of sound and its need to fit in between other sounds
Really nice explanation man 👌 I'd say though that many users of these plugins aren't really aware of this process and potential trade off and balance. And also the way soothe 2 seems to remove resonances is so much more detailed than e.g. silk vocals right? Like compared to the tools I showed here, it really seems oeksound have put some effort into differentiating a wanted harmonic from an unwanted resonance. But maybe just I just have that impression because I never used soothe 2 myself
Nicely done, @Beatsbastein. 🏆 You saved me the trouble of writing out what would have probably been a less concise, and because of that more confusing version of your comment. 😄
I actually made a deres video for the WA channel :D definitely useful. Also very manual and from that standpoint maybe comparable to a dynamic EQ or the way you could use smooth operator. Because it gives you manual control/ you *have* to manually select resonances, there's definitely less of a risk in just removing to many frequencies accidentally.
Personally I don't like Silk too much, but it's definitely still useful tool and I don't doubt that you can get great results with it. It seems to be basically the same thing as smooth operator, and I just prefer the way you can control that one
If you think how much unnecessary noise and resonancies there are in every track in hard rock mix you would see you just need to mix things to get everything through behind the rest of the noise. Maybe the resonance removing plugins are good if everything else in a mix is weak or thin and then there is a one or two elements that are like from a different planet.
What if you put several instances on a track that have each been set to "learn" what to remove from specific areas of the arrangement, and automated them to turn on/off at the correct moments? This would become cpu intensive, but I can imagine using it on individual tracks and freezing or rendering them, then eliminating the plugins from the chain once the plugin has done it's job. I would probably play around and see if it would work to "pre-treat" the dry signal first, then render that. It could become messy or impractical to run that many instances at the end of the chain, because it might become necessary to render down a lot of the other processing...wich I try not to do in case I need to do some slight tweaking somewhere in the chain. I would probably keep the effect a little more subtle for that reason.
It's an interesting idea. But at that point the automatic-ness kinda get lost I think. Maybe there could be some sort of pitch follower - or maybe a pitch following EQ would kinda be the better way to go at that point
Only static :) i mention it in a couple sentences in the video - i think it makes sense for this specific use, but it would be nice if there was a way for it to continuously react to changing frequencies amd shift the cuts up or down
all new stuff for modern people with too much time but with no creativity and no talent. ^^ Hint: all the decades before, people were making best music without all that modern stuff....
Removing resonances and cleaning up bad recordings is probably one of the most technical and least creative things in music... 😅 The real creative people will appreciate tools like this, believe me. And there are plenty of great artists out there making music right now!
