So many plugins are software versions of analogue hardware. In this article Julian suggests 5 plugins which do things which aren’t possible using analogue techniques - processors which don’t play by the rules.
Back in 2015 I wrote an article 5 Plug-ins That Perform Audio Tricks And Are Worth Checking Out. in it I considered exactly this question, which plugins do things which a few years ago weren’t availble to us. 6 years on it’s interesting to see how things have changed. Some of those techniques are largely taken for granted, for example I’m much more used to the idea of dynamic EQ than I was in 2015, but others like RX, have developed and grown new features and still leave most of us a little in awe.
Here are 5 plugins which weren’t around in 2015 which illustrate how powerful today’s state of the art plugin processing is.
Oeksound Soothe2
In a relatively short time Soothe, and the updated Soothe2 have created and dominated a new subcategory of plugin - Dynamic Resonance Supressors. At its simplest it is a dynamic EQ, the clever bit is the automatic way it detects the resonances it suppresses. It finds harsh or unpleasant sounds in your audio and err.. soothes them.
The new version builds on the original adding extra features and control but at its core it is still a plugin which finds issues and sweetens audio based on its “novel heuristics for finding resonances”. We don’t know what that means and Oeksound aren’t telling but it appears to work and work very well!
iZotope RX - Music Rebalance Module
Un-mixing multitrack material has been the holy grail of audio processing for a long time and progress in this direction is frustrating as huge progress has been made but we are still not at the point where it is possible to isolate an element from a stereo recording completely without the artefacts and bleed of the other instruments being too much of an issue for it to be used entirely out of its original context, especially if it were exposed rather than buried in an arrangement.
If true de-mixing, where something approaching the original multitrack could be extracted from stereo it would change the world in both good and bad ways. Record companies know how valuable their exclusive access to multitrack tapes is. However given that when used in isolation the results of de-mixing isn’t yet artefact-free, iZotope have taken a very pragmatic approach and built the Rebalance module, in which the relative levels of Voice, Bass, Percussion and Other can be adjusted relative to each other. The intended use is to shift the relative levels of these groups rather than to totally de-mix them. Used with care it can be very transparent and its remarkable to us that such processing is possible at all.
Sonnox DrumGate
Continuing the theme of AI in plugins, the humble gate doesn’t seem like the most exciting of processes but anyone who has ever used one will know that when setting up a gate you spend 80% of your time chasing down 5% of the hits. Those hits which are causing those false triggers are indistinguishable to a conventional gate detector in terms of level and or frequency content but to you as a listener that share drum which is opening your tom gate sounds completely different. You understand the difference between a tom and a snare, your conventional gate does not. You listen. the gate detector just hears.
Sonnox DrumGate understands the difference between a kick and snare and a tom, it listens rather than hears. This plugin is a great example of AI doing a simple job for us and saving huge amounts of time.
SoundRadix Auto Align Post
As the name suggests, Auto Align Post was conceived as a plugin aimed squarely at the post production community, to fix a very specific issue.
Production sound typically involves a boom mic held at distance and a lavalier mic worn by the actor. When finding the best sound using both mics at the same time could be problematic as the distance from the actor between the lavalier and the boom mic would change as the actor moved. Anyone who has ever moved one of two mics relative to a sound source will have heard the swooshing comb filtering this can produce and comb filtering which is moving is far more audible than a static series of cancellations.
Auto Align Post offers a way to dynamically fix these issues, something which the original Auto Align isn’t capable of. However it has come to our attention that the “press a button and its done” simplicity of Auto Align Post has made it popular with the music recording community because it is so fast and so good. Although it can fix dynamically changing phase relationships doesn’t mean you can’t use it for mics which aren’t moving.
Synchro Arts VocAlign Ultra
Continuing the theme of simplicity, Vocalign Ultra is a case in point. Vocalign has been around for a long time and its ability to match the timing of a guide track with a replacement dub track by applying variable timestretch made it a very popular tool with people working in post production to match ADR to picture and also very popular with music users for tightening the sync of vocal stacks.
Vocalign Ultra adds matching of pitch between the guide and the dub, something not previously available, with technology from Synchro Arts’ Revoice Pro software.
So the themes which seem to be emerging here are cleverer, simpler software. What process are you waiting for someone to invent?