In Summary

With corrective therapies already under their belt, oeksound have now turned their expertise towards more creative tonal shaping. So what does Bloom do and how does it sound? See and hear it for yourself as we take our first look.

Going Deeper

What is the difference between a technical fix and a creative flourish? Although there might not be a well defined line between the two, here is one way to look at it: a technical process might set out to make a compromised signal sound like its clean, natural sounding self. A creative twist might be something to make things sound even better to the listener than the real thing does, a bit like the cream in your coffee or sugar in your tea.

What Is Bloom?

Oeksound’s collection of audio plugins up until now consisted of two helpers with an arguable emphasis on audio fixes. Spiff and Soothe 2, may have gained a following for their respective fixes for transient shaping and resonance suppression, but Bloom has its feet planted firmly in the artistic side of things.

• Bloom is an adaptive tone shaping tool for creative treatments.

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

• 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.

• With Bloom, bright doesn’t need to mean shrill, and big doesn’t need to mean boomy.

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.”

oeksound Bloom Features And Sound

Hear Bloom for yourself below as we explore its features, and most importantly its sound. We take a tour of its Tone controls and their helpful added features, before moving onto Bloom’s deceptively simple Amount control. While lower values act upon the Tone controls’ influence, its Squash area takes this and introduces a unique oeksound flourish…

oeksound Bloom can be used to:

• 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.

You may have noticed a recent trend towards audio tools that do things for you. For some they can do the heavy lifting as that deadline looms, or simply make it sound better for people with their heads planted in pure artistry. These tools are far from compulsory; traditional tools are going absolutely nowhere for now, but equally automation is here to stay. For a task like equalising signals for art, the smart adaptive EQ is here.

Bloom moves away from what oeksound describe as “process-centric” tools, to one that takes the wider view, and their latest creation gives engineers another way to tonally shape their sounds dynamically and intelligently. Watch this space for when we take deeper look at Bloom in the not-too-distant future…