Recording - June 2020 - 45

Mid/Side

A significant addition in soothe 2 is
mid/side processing. Yes, some de-essers
can do mid/side processing, and some
de-essers utilize an automatic threshold
concept, but soothe 2 is the first plugin
I'm aware of that does both natively.
The reason mid/side is crucial for mastering is that usually, the lead vocals are in
the center, so with mid/side processing,
you can tame center channel sibilance
while leaving the side channels alone.
Or, in cases where wide-panned acoustic
guitars or backing vocals are too bright,
soothe 2 can address them without impacting things in the center. The addition
of mid/side in soothe 2 opens up another
world of possibilities, as it can be enabled
globally or per-EQ detection band.

Way down low

The other major improvement in soothe 2
is that instead of only being able to address
upper mid and high frequencies, soothe 2
can work all the way down to 20Hz. This
is something I requested to them early on
via Twitter and got a gentle nod that they
were working on it, so I'm pretty excited to
see it make the cut in version 2.

After hearing how effective the original
soothe was on high frequencies in mastering, I immediately wanted to do the same
with low mids and lows. Sometimes in
mastering, tom fills, or certain bass notes
can get out of control. In particular, I wanted something I could use when mastering
music that has upright acoustic bass such
as jazz and bluegrass. These instruments
are notoriously troublesome, and being a
non-fretted instrument, intonation variances due to human playing means that resonant frequencies can shift ever so slightly
throughout the song, making a fixed EQ
setting not as effective. In cases where
busy walking bass lines are just all over
the place, soothe 2 tames that nicely.
I've already been able to use soothe
2 on several acoustic-based recordings.
Now, upright bass, cello, etc. are much
easier to control in mastering. Here
soothe 2 truly is a miracle worker.

Soothing the CPU

Lastly, soothe 2 is now much less taxing
on the CPU. I can see this benefiting mixing and mastering engineers alike. Mixing
engineers can now use more instances per
song in real time, and mastering engineers

working at high sample rates can use the
higher quality settings without waiting to
turn them on when rendering. I'm doing
just that and have yet to feel any system
stress due to soothe 2. I should note that I
find it to be extremely stable in WaveLab
Pro, REAPER, and Pro Tools.

Final thoughts

I have no idea how they did it, but
oeksound managed to make an essential and unique plugin even better. If
you were a soothe user, soothe 2 is a
no-brainer upgrade. If you're not currently
using soothe, in my opinion, soothe 2 is
one of those indispensable plugins that
comes around once a decade. If you
work with digital audio, you need to be
working with soothe as well.
Justin Perkins (perkins@recordingmag.com)
is a mastering and mix engineer who
owns and operates Mystery Room
Mastering in Milwaukee. Learn more at
mysteryroommastering.com.
Price: 99€ (upgrade from
the original soothe 50€)
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Recording - June 2020

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