In Summary

With two well-regarded intelligent fixers already under their belt, oeksound have now turned their attention to something different with distinctly artistic leanings. Here we put Bloom to the Experts for them to deliver their verdicts...

Going Deeper

Making It Better

Much of audio engineering revolves around making things sound better. Recorded audio or synthesised sounds can often benefit from a little tweakage to get them to where they need to be, but the question of what better actually is isn’t quite as straightforward as spending some quality time with a processor or two.

Changes can be technical, setting out to make sounds as close as possible to their natural default selves, such as thinning out a little proximity, or catching the kind of sibilant components that mics seem to be so good at capturing. Artistic changes might on the other hand cover anything intended to ‘airbrush’ the results beyond a sound’s natural state. Some extra thump to that anaemic kick, extra sparkle on an acoustic guitar, or maybe some envelope shaping compression to give sounds extra precedence, for example.

Traditional manual ‘static’ and dynamic tools have been helping engineers achieve these things successfully for decades, but now developers are asking how things can be improved. More recently a whole raft of ‘intelligent’ adaptive tools have begun to emerge that can react to both simple sources, or the ever-changing harmonic vortices of busses and mixes.

oeksound Bloom - Overview

Oeksound’s collection of audio plugins up until now consisted of two helpers with an emphasis on audio fixes. Spiff and Soothe 2, may have gained a following for their respective transient shaping and resonance suppression, but their new tool has its feet planted firmly in the artistic side of things. Bloom sets out to give engineers another way to tonally shape their sounds dynamically and intelligently.

oeksound describe Bloom:

“In addition to being a quick broad-strokes EQ tool, Bloom can be thought of as our take on a colour box. It can give character, glue, or grit to your sound in a way that fits your vision. You might use it in place of a dynamic EQ, multiband compressor, saturator, or even compressor, but it falls under none of these categories. We call it an adaptive tone shaper.”

• Control and even out irregularities in a rough sound

• Increase warmth, clarity, or brightness in a safe and controlled fashion

• Transform the tone of a sound with natural-sounding results

• Explore alternate versions of a boring sample

oeksound Bloom explained:

• Bloom is an adaptive tone shaping tool for creative treatments. It is not is a dynamic EQ or multiband compressor, and in a move away from what others are doing, neither does Bloom use AI to do its thing.

• Bloom aims to increase warmth, clarity, or brightness, as well as controlling and evening out irregularities to makes things sound subjectively better.

• Bloom moves away from what oeksound describe as “process-centric” tools, to one that takes the wider view.

• Bloom automatically compensates for changes made in one frequency area by adjusting others. This means that adjusting tone control parameters in one frequency area can affect the processing in other areas.

• Tonal adjustments made with Bloom are dynamic and context-aware. This helps keep the material sounding natural, even when making radical changes.

Bloom - In Use

Recently we took our first look at Bloom to discover its sound and controls for ourselves:

Expert Panel - Hit or Miss?

In every Expert review we ask three of our team of contributors to give their first impressions of the product. We ask them to give the product a hit or miss, based on factors such as originality, innovation, usefulness, quality and value for money. For each hit the products gets an Expert Award. One hit and it gets our bronze award, two hits gets silver and for a hit from all three of the panel it gets a coveted gold award. Of course if there are three misses, there’s no award.

Ashea On oeksound Bloom

As a fan of Soothe, I was keen to test oeksound’s latest release and wasn’t disappointed.

Like a lot of freelance producers and engineers, I tend to work with vocals and dialogue of varied quality, some studio recorded and others tracked in less than ideal setups, so I often find myself spending time on corrective EQ manoeuvres.

Bloom has a number of presets, both corrective and tone enhancing that can be tweaked easily, but one of my favourites has to be ’Bye Bye Boxiness’ because of the speed, accuracy and transparency at which it transforms muffled and closed sounding vocals. Upon comparison, I found Bloom to be superior to techniques using typical parametric or multiband EQ. The visually appealing and highly intuitive GUI adds to the sensation of a sleek and streamlined workflow.

Another new habit of mine is adding an instance of Bloom to the master bus, selecting the '808 beat enhancer' preset and enjoying how my r&b, or pop productions come to life before even reaching the mix stage.

Arguably, now more than ever, time is money. By taking care of the tedious tone correction tasks, Bloom frees up my time for more creative aspects of the production process. Hit!

Eli Krantzberg On oeksound Bloom

I am a big fan of oeksound. Soothe 2 and Spiff are truly innovative, fresh plug-ins that enhance underlying audio in ways that would be very difficult to achieve otherwise. So I was excited to learn of Bloom, their latest "make things better" magic machine.

At first, I was a bit put off by the marketing hype. "Adaptive tone shaping; control irregularities in a rough sound; transform the tone of a sound with natural-sounding results” etc. But I know that outcome-driven plug-ins are often susceptible to this type of jargon, and with oeksound's track record, I give them the benefit of the doubt. After testing Bloom on several sources, there is a lot to like about it. But also, a fair bit to be hesitant about.

I find the 4 tone control sliders confusing. And the manual didn't help. For example: "The value is not expressed in dB, it’s rather a reference value. Moving the tone control handle up/down adjusts the level of the band. This changes the shape of the overall tone.....The tone frequency control value is not the exact centre frequency and serves only as a reference point. Each tone control band can affect the whole processing range, while they affect most of the frequency area indicated by the center frequency."

The band solo feature is useful, and the multi-coloured graph display is very helpful in understanding what is going on under the hood. I like the adaptive Squash and wet trim calibration. I wish all plug-ins had this sort of adaptive level matching. But I found that however the Squash calibration and time constants were set, dialling up more than a hint of it was too much for my taste. Rolling back the mix level helped make it usable. And it sounds really good in parallel. The Include and Exclude modes are also very useful for narrowing the areas processed by Bloom.

I tried Bloom on a multi-track drum bus, and just could not get results that I was satisfied with. There was a thinning of the girth in the low end that I could not get rid of no matter how I set the tone sliders and ranges. Using the mid-side modes proved interesting. But not the net improvement I was hoping for. It worked nicely in the first insert slot on a female lead vocal. But I didn't feel it was significantly different than anything I could achieve with a few bands of EQ. I also put it at the end of a clean electric guitar plug-in chain. It didn't do much there, but to be fair, the track was already fairly well processed. Since it was recorded dry directly through an audio interface, there wouldn't have been much point putting Bloom at the beginning of the signal processing chain. The one area where it did shine was on the mix bus of a pop arrangement. It brought out clarity in the mids without any adverse effects. In this scenario, it felt like a bit of magic.

There is no doubt that Bloom can sound fantastic when set properly. But it is not a "do no harm" plug-in. It requires tweaking and experimentation. To me, it falls into the "not necessary, but nice to have" category. More of a luxury than a necessity. Miss.

Mark Gittins On oeksound Bloom

When oeksound unveiled Soothe, I was blown away by their creation. Initially, it felt almost like cheating, but as I delved deeper, it became evident just how many invaluable hours of mixing could be salvaged with this plugin. Before long, it slid into my 'essential plugins folder'. And I'm certainly not alone in this sentiment. Soothe has garnered acclaim throughout the industry and is a staple tool for many top-dog engineers. So, when news of Bloom reached my ears, I was eager to give it a whirl, albeit with a hint of apprehension given its description as an 'Adaptive Tone Shaper'. Could it be just another plugin promising to magically enhance sound?

Bloom, however, proves to be far more than that. With its intelligent adaptation to incoming signals, it delicately boosts and attenuates frequencies in a controlled and pleasing manner. It's truly bloomin' good! Perfect for breathing life into individual tracks and buses, and when you dial up the amount knob towards the squash settings, things can get well and truly 'squished', taking on a distinct character and just sounding better, but a better that you have control over. The wizards at oeksound have done it again. Bravo. Hit.

oeksound Bloom gets an Experts Silver Award.