I think the issue is not in the interfaces, but in the producers ears and capabilities. The biggest impact ADDA conversion has is the first time (assuming sample rates and bit depth are consistent through each additional AD/DA conversion) and that's already REALLY small. The sample rate is going to constrain the audio in the first conversion, removing any frequencies above 1/2 of the sample rate (see Nyquist theorem.) With virtually all modern gear, those are going to be out of the range of human hearing. It's really not in the gear. The gear got better, not worse. It would be illogical to assume it's the gear.
@@akagerhard He specifically said "Cheaper microphones, cheaper interfaces".... yes it's the gear he's talking about. I upgraded from M-Audio FW410 to RME USB Babyface, the better word clock made a huge difference when EQ'ing in the box. I have an SM58 and AEA 44CE... Mackie preamps and Electrodyne preamps... etc etc
@@cylonvoiceguy The effect of the word clock is pretty much placebo, you won't be able to hear the difference between anything made in the last 30 years. If youre hearing a differnce from the M-audio it's gonna be in the cleaner gain you get with the babyface vs the noisier preamps of the m-audio
Completely agree with you regarding the increasing harshness. I mostly use these Oek plugins in the same way you’re describing. I think you’re right about the cheap mic, cheap interface thing, but it also comes down to cheap sounding samples, cheap sound synth VST or plastic sounding Kontakt kits etc. I also think a huge factor is so many people don’t create or record in ideal spaces, so tonal balances I get from clients for mixes are wayyyyyyy off. The productions are usually really cool but I end up spending a lot of time reworking the overall tonal imprint of a mix, and these plug-ins are amazing for that
this. Production is so so sos os os os osososssoossssssosooooooooooo fucking important thatn when done right makes the other two jobs (mix master) even easier but BETTER SOUNDNG. BRO WHEREEEEEEE can I get better sounding samples and sounds and what are better sounding virtual instrument's. I am trying to up my production. Is splice good? I herd they have a plethora of sounds on there and it high quality. And as for an interface, I got a cheap 99 pre sonus one thats old as hell. Any reccomendations for a high quality sounding one and mic?
@@cholkymilkmirage4984 it depends on the type of music you’re making, but Samples From Mars is a good place to start. I’d avoid Splice quite frankly - at this point it’s significantly oversaturated so it’s hard to find high quality sounds from reliable creators. The Arturia vintage synth collection and the Roland cloud synth collection are both very solid as VST synth collections. As are Diva and Trillian for bass. Pigments is also a very good VST synth. There are some really good live drum sample packs out there today as well, Jake Reed Music, Wave Tick drums, Shroom 020 … all recorded with high end gear and mics. For weirder more random types of samples you have to be more discerning and look more carefully, but they’re out there. Hope that helps, good luck!
@@cholkymilkmirage4984 for interface & mic: SSL2+ is the most slept on interface around. $299 bucks. Super cheap, with super solid preamps and conversion. For mic, the Aston Origin is probably the best cheap microphone around imo. Altho if you can afford an SM7b, which is only marginally more expensive, that would also be a great choice. The Sennheiser Mk4 is also pretty good, has a very forward and defined sound with a pronounced midrange though, so depends on if you like that kind of thing. If you can go higher with budget, TLM 102 is great, but then you’re entering the high end mic market, at which point you’d likely want a better preamp. All that said, if budget permits, I’d get the Heritage audio i73 … you can grab one for 1k USD and those pres are better than any other interface on the market, but the price reflects that. If you pair that with any of the 3 cheaper mics you will never really need anything better.
@@cholkymilkmirage4984AKG414 XLS is the reliable swiss army knife that works for everything. No harshess, it does have a very small boost around the limit of human hearing but i like it and a lot of people won't notice it, i can hear up to 19.4KHz.
20 day full trial. Wish I hadn't. This thing is superb. I have €200 to find. You missed the mid/side or L/R button Wytse. You can use it separately, different settings on both m/s or l/r. Soooo good. Also 😁 just done a test on three songs in production applying a preset i made on one to the others and it really helps create a unified common sound on all tracks. 100% SOLD
@@-Deena.When? The moment i saw this release it was at full price and everyoone asked to get a sort of intro price. But even that is dxpensive though.
Wow, what you described with harshness potentially as a result of stacked "okayness" is just what I've been experiencing while mixing. And that balance between letting a production sound open but keeping it from being too harsh has been so difficult when I run into this issue. Thanks for articulating what I've been dealing with! Might have to grab Bloom.
I was wondering this too. This has 4 bands that you can focus on individually but I think gulfoss can only focus on one thing at a time unless you open up another gulfoss
Video idea: You say this is a dynamic EQ. Do a video where you create similar sonic results between bloom and a dynamic EQ. Pro-Q 3, and Bloom, for instance. I'd love to see them side by side.
Yeah, I get lot of this kind of harshness You talk about in my productions. I think it's bad mic for my voice (rode nt1a, bad freq response for harsh polish language), boxiness of my recording environment (basically under the bed, some adaptation, but very poor), and my urge to saturate, overcompress and emulate analog chains in the box. Stacking a lot of plugins like Waves NLS/PA Amek or BX Console/Slate Neve Preamp emulation/Softube Tape/PA Black Box, Kazrog, PA Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor/Amek 200 EQ/PA SPL EQ. I cut with digital tools, I add with analog emulations. I think I do It a lot, and propably too much. Then I compensate with soothe or lindell deesser to cut all the harshness. I think especially doubling transformer - based emulations like black box+kazrog - it can mess 3k+ a lot. I tried to mix/master all digital, but it still seems to me that my recordings are harmonically lacking. I cannot afford analog tools, and I don't have a place for it. My recording interface are AXE I/O for guitar and Midas MR18 for vocal and acoustic guitar mics. Amp sims and captures from IK Multimedia Amplitube 5 and Tonex max. You can judge by Yourself - just listen to my rock or rap tracks on my channel.
@@coryrogers846 The track is called "Light on Your Feet". Ryan plays most, if not all the instruments you hear on his songs. He's also a massively talented drummer and nice guy. I recommend you check out his music!
Great video. Definitely related to the harshness +4k on my own productions and have been exploring what it could be. I record and mix my own tracks and suspect I'm not dealing with my high frequencies as accurately as I could. Potentially not supported by home studio monitoring too.
I've noticed that a lot of "prosumer" interfaces produce thin vocals. I think that certain interface brands produce more natural sounding vocals. Lots of remedies have to be applied to fix the thin sounding vocals. As a matter of fact I have even heard that noticeably "thin" vocal sound from famous engineers who have the budget to afford whatever gear they want. They fell for the same marketing as the rest of us. Everything else in their mixes sounds great except the vocals. I think this one distinction is keeping the wannabes struggling to catch up with the big houses. There are actually some affordable interfaces that don't have these issues. There are also more expensive gear that render thin vocals. But I think the vocal sound of an interface might be a good place to check first in order to find out if you will be merely stacking harsh okayness and using various tricks to compensate for vocal thinness with the low quality converters. Start with finding out which companies write their own drivers. Many are outsourcing this process and can't afford to optimize the chip sets because they aren't handling this in house. This also leads to compatibility nightmares. Hint: the famous company who is writing their own drivers is based in Germany. Their interfaces keep working forever and don't lose compatibility.
Basically it's Gullfoss with a slightly different target EQ. That and 4 band EQ build in and some compression when the dial goes beyond 7. There is no need to get this if you already own gullfoss. The two different plugins have been tested and similar results can be had.
@@gravgrav5335 Totally agree with what you wrote. You can put an EQ-curve before Gullfoss to make it sound like Bloom. They are in fact very similar. I don't use either in the end product. Gullfoss or Bloom are used to create a reference track, then I will recreate the EQ curve using the REFERENCE plugin. That way you get a great sounding track without artefacts. That actually sounds much better. (Bloom sounds harsh, probably aliasing).
The ‘harshness’ you talk about at 7:55 sounds a lot like it might be the build up of aliasing. I’ve completely given up using plugins that introduce any harmonics (even those that do enormous amounts of oversampling) and, lo and behold, all the harshness’s I used to hear has disappeared. However before I did that I used to use Soothe to mitigate the digital harshness.
Soothe is a brilliant plugin, I bought it when it was discounted. I wish their plugins would be a bit more affordable though, 199 € is a lot of money for a plugin...
Yeah I also encounter those "restless highs" and from my experience, after asking what setup they used and so on, it pretty much almost always boils down to them having purchased a bundle of gear where there is a discount and surprisingly often I find the Rode NT1A to be the common factor in all those recordings, at least for vocals. For OHs it seems km184 are the new standard, but the newer production line also seems to like to produce some resonant frequencies, I don't know what's up with that. But that are my 2 cents :)
For me, the key word in OEK Sounds description of what Bloom does is make the output sound NATURAL. I've tried the demo on vocals and acoustic guitar recordings, which I really struggle with to tame certain frequencies and still get them to sound 'natural', Natural, to me, usually means realistic and sounding relaxed / not stressed due to over compression or certain frequencies being over emphasised (too much ok-ness) or dimmed. Bloom worked beautifully in my test cases. Particularly as the source materials were not perfect to start with. I highly recommend trying the Bloom demo.
i think a lot of harsh stuff and just high end issues ive had to deal with is things like bleed in different mics, or stuff that has been boosted as a result of eqing a mic particularly with drums, which in itself can be a mic issue because different mics color the off axis sound differently, its weird theres a lot of causes i feel for unwanted harshness and just clutter in a mix, whether it be the wrong choice of mic for source material (or i guess as you mentioned preamps though i havent looked into that enough), or just processing something way too much, ive found that theres an unhealthy habit of putting too much on a sound nowadays, less it more at times (i guess unless youre sound designing or something)
I didn't know that the AKG 414 XLS is so much better than the XL2 version. The XL2 has issues with the 2KHz-10KHz region, 6KHz in particular has a boost of 5 dB and i hate 6KHz. I think bleeding by itself isn't the main problem, bleeding can't be avoided only reduced. Harshess is produced by aliasing, aliasing ruins clarity for anything above 14KHz, there are a lot of mixing tutorials on youtube with waves plugins and they have significant aliasing problems (they can't handle any sampling rate).
CAN YOU PLEASE MAKE A VIDEO ABOUT „THE_STRIP“ PLUGIN FROM PHIL SPEISER? Sorry for screaming, it‘s an AI ASSISTANCE mixing plugin, I‘d really love to hear your opinion❤️
After testing it’s pretty similar. IMO bloom has a better UI. I’m not sure if the algorithm is more heavy handed in Equalizer but I seem to get slightly better/more transparent results out of bloom. They’re close though and as an Equalizer owner I probably won’t be paying the 200 bucks to keep bloom, even though I regularly use oeksound’s other stuff. Also, bloom isn’t really “multi band,” you actually have a bit more tone shaping control in Equalizer. It’s just how the interface is laid out.
I relatively new to taking on clients for engineering. Self taught, but I strive for excellence and not cutting corners. So far I’ve been nothing but frustrated with the quality recordings from my clients. You mentioned the common harshness above 4k. I recently had a client who recorded a whole psychedelic soul record in a random room with 120+ tracks. The amount of harshness is unbelievable and I took on the project just to see how far my current knowledge can take me. My client is happy but I secretly hate the finished product lol. I think that in a world where recording is so accessible, and the standard for quality recording has diminished, this tool could aid the engineer that is striving to achieve excellence results. Can someone answer me, where do you draw the line with the quality of recording you can take on?
Good test, but wouldn't it also be interesting to take a track where you have deliberately cut or limited frequencies throughout or on individual tracks? To see whether you can get close to an original mix and whether a dynamic EQ achieves similar, worse or better results. And to discuss the pros and cons!
It did not work well on tracks with heavy low end beats and bass, but I do not think it was meant for that, anyway...Thanks for all the work you do bud - cheers from Canada
I allways had problems with restless highs. If i turn hem down, my music sounded dusty. I had to work years to enhance this problem. I do this in the master chain of the mix. And still now days im not at that point.
Ohhh ya, I've noticed the same things! I'm a freelancer so I work with a lot of "home studio" musicians and MANY projects I get to work on the recordings are sub par.
We're making a vid on this right now. LOVED it for M/S stuff on mix bus and synths and such. But we heard some serious artifacts on some sharp vocals. Did you guys hear this too? Or do our vocals just suck lol
Atleast to me, if anything, the problem is muddiness in today’s world. Bad rooms bad sound selections etc… harshness is so much easier to fix in my opinion. But bloom Is amazing at muddiness too.
I agree with this, I use almost exclusively vsts, except for vocals and I spent a LOT of time eqing harsh frequencies. For people like me this could be such a time saver paired with soothe
Watched the 2 videos on the OekSound site and played around with Bloom for about the last hour or so. The engineering on this plug-in is incredible really, and the care they put into it. This is a plug-in i'd definitely put into my repertoire. Just not for 200, maybe during a good sale sometime. Oh and the guy from the videos looks like a 21st century version of Ivar The Boneless from that Vikings show.
Helpful, it seems to be an true Automatic Gain Control. Gain riding with near infinite frequency control. IMO, overuse would over homogenize the resulting mix, great for background music tracks. The only negative is the pastel background color. I find it VERY hard to read.
i think digital interfaces sound less harsh now than ever i think what has changed is your ability to hear the build up in the high end. as my ears have developed over the years i have noticed the same thing.. i mainly mix live sound and my ears are so much more sensitive to whats going on up high now than say 10 years ago..
Could you use Soothe2, Spiff and Bloom to do the same thing on the same track to see what the differences are? I own Soothe2, but can't get my head around why I would want Bloom or Spiff
so Lol its just a multiband compressor. I mean, probably spectral compression, but whatever you know what i mean... Actually, I shouldnt hate, the biggest problem nowadays is getting spectral compression to work nicely with as little artifacts as possible, so this is where Oeksound's brilliance will show how good they are at achieving this. Nice video
To be honest, i thought it made everything sound like it was made from plastic. Might be great on certain toy sound genres. Or maybe my ears are different from other peoples, I tend to dislike what gulfoss does as well most of the time.
Agreed… but only if you use it on everything. A bit here and there where you actually have a problem and it’s amazing… but if you plaster it over every track you end up with a weird synthetic sound where nothing sounds interesting.
So I’m guessing this just forces the signal to look more like pink noise, unless you play with the faders, when it’s pink noise plus an EQ curve. Pretty much the Recover function in Gullfoss (where Soothe is the Tame function). I would save your money and stick with Gullfoss.
oeksound has stated that it doesnt use a reference target. if you dont already have gulfoss and are looking to drop 200 euros on an automatic dynamic EQ plugin i think this might be a compelling option, but not for me i think.
I compared between Bloom and Gullfoss. Gullfoss is dynamic EQ, Bloom isn't. It is making something additional which make track sounding nice. Gullfoss doesn't do that.
People keep saying it's not a dynamic EQ... then, what is it? If I were pumping out product, producing or especially mixing lots of singers with their guitars, all trying to sound like each other, then $200 to have a "singer songwriter" preset, that might work elsewhere too, who knows, might then seem to be worth it. For actual me, who doesn't do any of those things, this product obviously isn't for me, but I'm still curious about what the actual functionality is, if it's NOT a dynamic EQ? "It makes the sound bloom" isn't a functionality - it's a phrase you learn at audiophile sales camp. What does it do to the sound? In synth sound design, you can make the sound bloom via a slow attack, and set the curve of the attack for how you want it to bloom (exp, log, complex, etc). And then you would do the same with the sound's brightness, the higher harmonics, often using a filter envelope. If you were the mixer not the producer, and couldn't program the sound to bloom at the source, then you could use a dynamic EQ, or a multiband compressor... but these are all approaching the same idea... a multiband dynamic ducker/expander. You could make a Bloom preset, a Soothe preset, or whatever, and then fine them for specific tracks as needed. Then you'd add a different reverb depending on whether you want it to bloom or smear, etc. So then, when people tell me this ISN'T a set of expansion presets for a multiband dynamics processor, I wonder what it actually IS. That's not such a strange reaction, is it? If the software is using a different technique than the stuff I mentioned, I'd love to learn that, or at least to know about it. Someone else suggested that it could be dynamic EQ using a reference curve, such as pink noise, as the target to match. People said it's not that. Okay, then what IS it?
Bloom on the master bus definitely loses sub bass definition. I'm not convinced by it tbh. It tends to blur everything. I am going to stick to simple EQ and multiband compression.
The most similar ones are gulfoss and equalizer curious that both are ones you didn't like. About the harshness teme I feel the same and for me Cames also from the pollution of ac current and electromagnetic fields arround us. Maybe a some sort of lower octave distortion and also that the quality of vocal booths and home studio acoustics is getting worse because more people's are investing in having one instead of going in a professional studio.
On paper yes, but in practice its nothing like Gulfoss. You have much more control over the sonic character - it can work on tracks, groups and the mixbus, and in my opinion it sounds way more natural and refined than Gullfoss. Gulfoss is also quite good, but I would pick Bloom every time over the other.
@@maailmanalkuHave you ever tried Voxengo TEOTE or Soniformer? From what I can tell, soniformer seems like a manual version of these auto-EQ's. I've been demoing soniformer recently and the work flow manages to be quick, specific, AND complex all at the same time. Am I missing something about why it's not more universally praised or at least mentioned? I'm curious how you think it compares to the more expensive and well-known options.
Tectonic from Aberrant DSP has already done something very similar and much cheaper. The Oeksound bloom controls are easier to understand, the rest seems very the same to me
Hey there, i have noticed over the years that the harshness you are talking about often comes from gain staging issues. (Driving "analog emulations" to hard) Driving into plugins without headroom left often leads to ugly kind of digital clipping. Which is not always obvious at first. As you said it accumulates with instances of many plugins being "overdriven". All the best, thank you for your work!
ask them if using Gulfoss. By default, without cutting it, it boosts highs ( because it is stupid and does not know that there is a natural roll off there in all mixes ). Couple that with modest monitoring and we can't hear the high freq boosts. My money is on Gulfoss being the culprit!
The harshness is interesting, I also noticed this. My theory is that it could be a combination of : - studios using low INTERNAL samplerates in their software when rendering out songs. For example, often people think bit-depth is important, and it is for plain mixing, but when using filtering, sample rate is king, and it has been shown to be much more audible (for example, compare a 12 bit track with a 24 bit track, and then a 11khz track with a 44khz track). Since many people use DAWs with long chains of filtering (EQ, effects etc), this starts to add up - plugins using internal upsampling and downsampling. Yes that is much better than not doing so, but the problem is that every upsample and downsample creates digital artifacts. and because we want low latency, and CPU usage, you get lower accuracy. It's fine for a single VST or processor, but add a chain of 5 or more in the signal chain and things start to add up I tested with forcing my DAW to run at a higher sample rate (using a virtual sound card), and the difference was clearly noticable to me. Of course, that does incur higher processing cost. But you can also simply do this when rendering a song. And be careful not to freeze a track before that at just 44khz...
It's just a trend and has been for many years. It's not due to the processors, it's due to the people using the processors. The average samplerate got higher, not lower. People (re)produce what they hear. If they hear very present and forward vocals on all mainstream productions, they will attempt to replicate that sound. It's illogical to me that you would assume that such VERY audible trends are due to subtle differences like 44,1kHz vs 96kHz samplerates, artifacts of oversampling, etc. I can stack 10 processors that alias (oversampled ones would be even less audible) on top of each other on the masterbus of a session that runs at 44,1kHz, if I boost 2 dB at 5kHz on a duplicate with NO aliasing in a session at 96kHz the 96kHz session will still sound harsher. Why would you look for obvious answers in sublte places? The main sculpting of the sound in production does not come from sublte little artifacts. Everything got better. Hardware got better plugins got a LOT better, so why would there be more harsh sound due to processors now?
I think the harshness is like you said- It's a build up of OK-ness. The same thing happens in the analog realm, right? Subtle harmonics from the circuitry at each step of the process add up to something noticeable at the end.
Awesome plugin! But what a shame they didnt do an intro offering! Everyone was/is pissed and now we all have to wait for the first sale. Created such unnecessary tension, big marketing/launch strategy fail from Oeksound imho. Its a company I WANT to like because they do cool innovative shit, but this was just a greedy ass move...
So… while mixing, one listens to the same thing over and over again. Then anything that adds extra ’movement’ to the sound seems like a good thing. But the average listener is not listening like that. To me it seems that generally these ‘tone shapers’ produce a thin sound, and I use them cautiously.
I'm happy for my music to sound crappy and to spend my $200 on mind alteration to compensate for a lack in production, ah the good old days, nice demo though....
yes please do some more videos/research on 'harshness', i for example use two mics and even when EQ matched one is somehow harsher and i can't make technical sense out of it
Nice to hear Sandstorm finally run through Bloom.
more like a sand breeze than a storm now
Lucky u two, mine had no sand in it
My neigbor has an RV camper that says “Sandstorm” across it in huge letters. It makes me laugh & think of this channel every time I see it
I love Sandstorm and it sounded especially good through Bloom....good work....
my gosh, this made me lol irl
"... stacking all the "OK-ness" on top of each other".... brilliant explanation of why some thing sound the way they do!
I think the issue is not in the interfaces, but in the producers ears and capabilities. The biggest impact ADDA conversion has is the first time (assuming sample rates and bit depth are consistent through each additional AD/DA conversion) and that's already REALLY small. The sample rate is going to constrain the audio in the first conversion, removing any frequencies above 1/2 of the sample rate (see Nyquist theorem.) With virtually all modern gear, those are going to be out of the range of human hearing.
It's really not in the gear. The gear got better, not worse. It would be illogical to assume it's the gear.
@@akagerhard He specifically said "Cheaper microphones, cheaper interfaces".... yes it's the gear he's talking about. I upgraded from M-Audio FW410 to RME USB Babyface, the better word clock made a huge difference when EQ'ing in the box. I have an SM58 and AEA 44CE... Mackie preamps and Electrodyne preamps... etc etc
@@cylonvoiceguy The effect of the word clock is pretty much placebo, you won't be able to hear the difference between anything made in the last 30 years. If youre hearing a differnce from the M-audio it's gonna be in the cleaner gain you get with the babyface vs the noisier preamps of the m-audio
It's always so much fun watching you work, dude. What an enjoyable, fresh perspective you always deliver. I'll continue to support!! Much love.
Completely agree with you regarding the increasing harshness. I mostly use these Oek plugins in the same way you’re describing. I think you’re right about the cheap mic, cheap interface thing, but it also comes down to cheap sounding samples, cheap sound synth VST or plastic sounding Kontakt kits etc. I also think a huge factor is so many people don’t create or record in ideal spaces, so tonal balances I get from clients for mixes are wayyyyyyy off. The productions are usually really cool but I end up spending a lot of time reworking the overall tonal imprint of a mix, and these plug-ins are amazing for that
this. Production is so so sos os os os osososssoossssssosooooooooooo fucking important thatn when done right makes the other two jobs (mix master) even easier but BETTER SOUNDNG.
BRO WHEREEEEEEE can I get better sounding samples and sounds and what are better sounding virtual instrument's. I am trying to up my production. Is splice good? I herd they have a plethora of sounds on there and it high quality. And as for an interface, I got a cheap 99 pre sonus one thats old as hell. Any reccomendations for a high quality sounding one and mic?
@@cholkymilkmirage4984 it depends on the type of music you’re making, but Samples From Mars is a good place to start. I’d avoid Splice quite frankly - at this point it’s significantly oversaturated so it’s hard to find high quality sounds from reliable creators. The Arturia vintage synth collection and the Roland cloud synth collection are both very solid as VST synth collections. As are Diva and Trillian for bass. Pigments is also a very good VST synth. There are some really good live drum sample packs out there today as well, Jake Reed Music, Wave Tick drums, Shroom 020 … all recorded with high end gear and mics. For weirder more random types of samples you have to be more discerning and look more carefully, but they’re out there. Hope that helps, good luck!
@@cholkymilkmirage4984 for interface & mic: SSL2+ is the most slept on interface around. $299 bucks. Super cheap, with super solid preamps and conversion. For mic, the Aston Origin is probably the best cheap microphone around imo. Altho if you can afford an SM7b, which is only marginally more expensive, that would also be a great choice. The Sennheiser Mk4 is also pretty good, has a very forward and defined sound with a pronounced midrange though, so depends on if you like that kind of thing. If you can go higher with budget, TLM 102 is great, but then you’re entering the high end mic market, at which point you’d likely want a better preamp. All that said, if budget permits, I’d get the Heritage audio i73 … you can grab one for 1k USD and those pres are better than any other interface on the market, but the price reflects that. If you pair that with any of the 3 cheaper mics you will never really need anything better.
@@cholkymilkmirage4984AKG414 XLS is the reliable swiss army knife that works for everything. No harshess, it does have a very small boost around the limit of human hearing but i like it and a lot of people won't notice it, i can hear up to 19.4KHz.
It's pink ! I love it ! Great show !
Your knowledge and personality is a gem - stay you.
The kick in this track is so fucking nice. RIGHT up my street jesus christ.
💯
Exactly the first thing I noticed. It sound so perfect.
"Stacking 'OK ness".. love it. my new saying. gonna try it at work. "You guys are not shining here because you're just stacking OK ness"
20 day full trial. Wish I hadn't. This thing is superb. I have €200 to find. You missed the mid/side or L/R button Wytse. You can use it separately, different settings on both m/s or l/r. Soooo good. Also 😁 just done a test on three songs in production applying a preset i made on one to the others and it really helps create a unified common sound on all tracks. 100% SOLD
They should have done an intro offering as everyone else does it..
@@KYTHERAOfficial It's was at €169 intro.
@@-Deena.When? The moment i saw this release it was at full price and everyoone asked to get a sort of intro price. But even that is dxpensive though.
@@DJayFreeDoo It is still now £169 Go look. 🧡
@@DJayFreeDoo £.169, apols, not €. It's still £169.
Those drums are smackin... I love that tone and kit...
Wow, what you described with harshness potentially as a result of stacked "okayness" is just what I've been experiencing while mixing. And that balance between letting a production sound open but keeping it from being too harsh has been so difficult when I run into this issue. Thanks for articulating what I've been dealing with! Might have to grab Bloom.
Would this be comparable to something like Gullfoss?
I was wondering this too. This has 4 bands that you can focus on individually but I think gulfoss can only focus on one thing at a time unless you open up another gulfoss
Video idea: You say this is a dynamic EQ. Do a video where you create similar sonic results between bloom and a dynamic EQ. Pro-Q 3, and Bloom, for instance. I'd love to see them side by side.
It really isn't just a multi-band dynamic EQ though...seriously, its not.
@@-Deena.I agree. Tho, I'd still love to see a plugin comparison. He can illustrate how bloom is similar and different from a dynamic EQ.
Been on the fence if I should buy this or not... I think the price is too high
Cheaper one week now!
You missed the sale this year
@ nope I got it a couple of weeks ago ;)
It’s something like gulfoss, isn’t it?
Yeah, I get lot of this kind of harshness You talk about in my productions. I think it's bad mic for my voice (rode nt1a, bad freq response for harsh polish language), boxiness of my recording environment (basically under the bed, some adaptation, but very poor), and my urge to saturate, overcompress and emulate analog chains in the box. Stacking a lot of plugins like Waves NLS/PA Amek or BX Console/Slate Neve Preamp emulation/Softube Tape/PA Black Box, Kazrog, PA Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor/Amek 200 EQ/PA SPL EQ. I cut with digital tools, I add with analog emulations. I think I do It a lot, and propably too much. Then I compensate with soothe or lindell deesser to cut all the harshness. I think especially doubling transformer - based emulations like black box+kazrog - it can mess 3k+ a lot.
I tried to mix/master all digital, but it still seems to me that my recordings are harmonically lacking. I cannot afford analog tools, and I don't have a place for it. My recording interface are AXE I/O for guitar and Midas MR18 for vocal and acoustic guitar mics. Amp sims and captures from IK Multimedia Amplitube 5 and Tonex max. You can judge by Yourself - just listen to my rock or rap tracks on my channel.
I just took a listen to your tracks. Very smooth-sounding. Clear and smooth...
Very cool to hear a Ryan James Carr track!
@@coryrogers846 The track is called "Light on Your Feet". Ryan plays most, if not all the instruments you hear on his songs. He's also a massively talented drummer and nice guy. I recommend you check out his music!
Finally. I think this thing does a really good job with muddy sounds also.
so does soothe
Yes, just like ten other plugins on the market for a fraction of the price.
Great video. Definitely related to the harshness +4k on my own productions and have been exploring what it could be. I record and mix my own tracks and suspect I'm not dealing with my high frequencies as accurately as I could. Potentially not supported by home studio monitoring too.
What's the difference bw this and soonible smart eq ?? For me they''re basically the same thing
I've noticed that a lot of "prosumer" interfaces produce thin vocals. I think that certain interface brands produce more natural sounding vocals. Lots of remedies have to be applied to fix the thin sounding vocals. As a matter of fact I have even heard that noticeably "thin" vocal sound from famous engineers who have the budget to afford whatever gear they want. They fell for the same marketing as the rest of us. Everything else in their mixes sounds great except the vocals. I think this one distinction is keeping the wannabes struggling to catch up with the big houses. There are actually some affordable interfaces that don't have these issues. There are also more expensive gear that render thin vocals. But I think the vocal sound of an interface might be a good place to check first in order to find out if you will be merely stacking harsh okayness and using various tricks to compensate for vocal thinness with the low quality converters. Start with finding out which companies write their own drivers. Many are outsourcing this process and can't afford to optimize the chip sets because they aren't handling this in house. This also leads to compatibility nightmares. Hint: the famous company who is writing their own drivers is based in Germany. Their interfaces keep working forever and don't lose compatibility.
Basically it's Gullfoss with a slightly different target EQ. That and 4 band EQ build in and some compression when the dial goes beyond 7. There is no need to get this if you already own gullfoss. The two different plugins have been tested and similar results can be had.
@@gravgrav5335 Totally agree with what you wrote. You can put an EQ-curve before Gullfoss to make it sound like Bloom. They are in fact very similar. I don't use either in the end product. Gullfoss or Bloom are used to create a reference track, then I will recreate the EQ curve using the REFERENCE plugin. That way you get a great sounding track without artefacts. That actually sounds much better. (Bloom sounds harsh, probably aliasing).
Awesome video, thanks. WHERE CAN I GET THAT T-SHIRT you're wearing? I love it.
Isn´t it the same like soothe only with multi bands instead of the eq band setup?
So it’s a dynamic EQ with a preset limiter?
It’s also multiband compression and saturation all combined-hence why they call it a tone shaper
The ‘harshness’ you talk about at 7:55 sounds a lot like it might be the build up of aliasing. I’ve completely given up using plugins that introduce any harmonics (even those that do enormous amounts of oversampling) and, lo and behold, all the harshness’s I used to hear has disappeared. However before I did that I used to use Soothe to mitigate the digital harshness.
So it's like a dynamic EQ but with "adaptativa" bands?
If you find over time that this is genuinely adding something beyond more familiar tools, I'd love to hear about it.
Soothe is a brilliant plugin, I bought it when it was discounted. I wish their plugins would be a bit more affordable though, 199 € is a lot of money for a plugin...
Wytse seems to show, which audio companies have t-shirts with their logo.
yeah, sounds good. I'll more than likely try it out on my next batch
have you updated your catalog of songs you have mixed lately?
I dunno when I hear that high end sparkle I’m thinking buy it. I’ll have to try the demo when I’m ready
After every review I was just waiting to hear yours bc i value it more
New sub man, every video you do is so helpful
Yeah I also encounter those "restless highs" and from my experience, after asking what setup they used and so on, it pretty much almost always boils down to them having purchased a bundle of gear where there is a discount and surprisingly often I find the Rode NT1A to be the common factor in all those recordings, at least for vocals.
For OHs it seems km184 are the new standard, but the newer production line also seems to like to produce some resonant frequencies, I don't know what's up with that. But that are my 2 cents :)
where to buy your tshirt?
For me, the key word in OEK Sounds description of what Bloom does is make the output sound NATURAL.
I've tried the demo on vocals and acoustic guitar recordings, which I really struggle with to tame certain frequencies and still get them to sound 'natural', Natural, to me, usually means realistic and sounding relaxed / not stressed due to over compression or certain frequencies being over emphasised (too much ok-ness) or dimmed.
Bloom worked beautifully in my test cases. Particularly as the source materials were not perfect to start with.
I highly recommend trying the Bloom demo.
Yet another WhiteSeaStudio video demonstrating the versatility of Sandstorm. Darude is GOATED
i think a lot of harsh stuff and just high end issues ive had to deal with is things like bleed in different mics, or stuff that has been boosted as a result of eqing a mic particularly with drums, which in itself can be a mic issue because different mics color the off axis sound differently, its weird theres a lot of causes i feel for unwanted harshness and just clutter in a mix, whether it be the wrong choice of mic for source material (or i guess as you mentioned preamps though i havent looked into that enough), or just processing something way too much, ive found that theres an unhealthy habit of putting too much on a sound nowadays, less it more at times (i guess unless youre sound designing or something)
I didn't know that the AKG 414 XLS is so much better than the XL2 version. The XL2 has issues with the 2KHz-10KHz region, 6KHz in particular has a boost of 5 dB and i hate 6KHz. I think bleeding by itself isn't the main problem, bleeding can't be avoided only reduced.
Harshess is produced by aliasing, aliasing ruins clarity for anything above 14KHz, there are a lot of mixing tutorials on youtube with waves plugins and they have significant aliasing problems (they can't handle any sampling rate).
Where would you place it in your vox chain?
CAN YOU PLEASE MAKE A VIDEO ABOUT „THE_STRIP“ PLUGIN FROM PHIL SPEISER? Sorry for screaming, it‘s an AI ASSISTANCE mixing plugin, I‘d really love to hear your opinion❤️
I keep wondering if it’s a multi-band version of Wavesfactory Equalizer.
After testing it’s pretty similar. IMO bloom has a better UI. I’m not sure if the algorithm is more heavy handed in Equalizer but I seem to get slightly better/more transparent results out of bloom. They’re close though and as an Equalizer owner I probably won’t be paying the 200 bucks to keep bloom, even though I regularly use oeksound’s other stuff. Also, bloom isn’t really “multi band,” you actually have a bit more tone shaping control in Equalizer. It’s just how the interface is laid out.
I relatively new to taking on clients for engineering. Self taught, but I strive for excellence and not cutting corners. So far I’ve been nothing but frustrated with the quality recordings from my clients.
You mentioned the common harshness above 4k. I recently had a client who recorded a whole psychedelic soul record in a random room with 120+ tracks. The amount of harshness is unbelievable and I took on the project just to see how far my current knowledge can take me. My client is happy but I secretly hate the finished product lol.
I think that in a world where recording is so accessible, and the standard for quality recording has diminished, this tool could aid the engineer that is striving to achieve excellence results.
Can someone answer me, where do you draw the line with the quality of recording you can take on?
At the number of zeros in the down payment check (also, always assume the down payment is the only payment).
Given the prices I paid for things like Reason, Arturia V-Collection or TDR Plugin Collection, those prices for a single effect are much too high.
I personally dont like soothe. I think using the right comp and eqing into it and after it can yield even better results in correcting the ok-ness
What's that tune???!!!! Soooo cool!!!!!!
Good test, but wouldn't it also be interesting to take a track where you have deliberately cut or limited frequencies throughout or on individual tracks? To see whether you can get close to an original mix and whether a dynamic EQ achieves similar, worse or better results. And to discuss the pros and cons!
Basically it's an adaptive EQ..
My thoughts (without testing) is that Bloom is very similar to Soothe 2, not worthing the purchase If you own Soothe 2. I'm I tripping?
It did not work well on tracks with heavy low end beats and bass, but I do not think it was meant for that, anyway...Thanks for all the work you do bud - cheers from Canada
8:30 100% have you noticed on dialogue tracks the are thick ssssss that have to be fought to softened
Wonder how much it really adds compared to TEOTE and Gullfoss. Yes you have more control over the curve but for 200? IDk
i was wrong it's really good and sounds better than those 2
I allways had problems with restless highs. If i turn hem down, my music sounded dusty. I had to work years to enhance this problem. I do this in the master chain of the mix. And still now days im not at that point.
multiband gulfoss eq,
also, the harshness u mention at 8.00,
you know the source, it 's OTT
Ohhh ya, I've noticed the same things! I'm a freelancer so I work with a lot of "home studio" musicians and MANY projects I get to work on the recordings are sub par.
We're making a vid on this right now. LOVED it for M/S stuff on mix bus and synths and such. But we heard some serious artifacts on some sharp vocals. Did you guys hear this too? Or do our vocals just suck lol
this sandstorm feelish damn smooth, eerh i mean blooom
Harshness (perhaps) = Zeitgeist?... was my first spontaneous thought. Get my drift?
Think I'll stick with TDR Nova and save a few pennies. They (Oeksound) do pretty GUI.
Similar to voxengo teote, except multiband. But sounds close.
Yes and no. Technically they are very different at least.
I think the increased harshness in more recent productions is probably from many producers not gain staging.
Atleast to me, if anything, the problem is muddiness in today’s world. Bad rooms bad sound selections etc… harshness is so much easier to fix in my opinion. But bloom Is amazing at muddiness too.
This plugin does wonders with acoustic guitars!!
the harshens comes form vst synthesisers, because there is no natural high freq rollout and all osc are in phase it will build up in high frequencies
also ott and and digital distrorion whith antialiasing will create this high freq build up
I agree with this, I use almost exclusively vsts, except for vocals and I spent a LOT of time eqing harsh frequencies.
For people like me this could be such a time saver paired with soothe
Watched the 2 videos on the OekSound site and played around with Bloom for about the last hour or so. The engineering on this plug-in is incredible really, and the care they put into it. This is a plug-in i'd definitely put into my repertoire. Just not for 200, maybe during a good sale sometime. Oh and the guy from the videos looks like a 21st century version of Ivar The Boneless from that Vikings show.
I'm at 5:00. Will be fun to see what you think in the end. I think it's brilliant at this stage.
Damn, i was sure i don't want it but now i sort of do
I have it on trial and consitently getter better result with smart:eq4 in adaptive mode.
Does that have a squash mode?
I would also .. Loooooove to figure that out, man ... Gvd.
Please let us know!
Helpful, it seems to be an true Automatic Gain Control. Gain riding with near infinite frequency control. IMO, overuse would over homogenize the resulting mix, great for background music tracks. The only negative is the pastel background color. I find it VERY hard to read.
i think digital interfaces sound less harsh now than ever i think what has changed is your ability to hear the build up in the high end. as my ears have developed over the years i have noticed the same thing.. i mainly mix live sound and my ears are so much more sensitive to whats going on up high now than say 10 years ago..
Having some guitar signal harshness lately but might be a mixing/fader issue, but seeing this gives me hope for correction for a lazy session.
Could you use Soothe2, Spiff and Bloom to do the same thing on the same track to see what the differences are? I own Soothe2, but can't get my head around why I would want Bloom or Spiff
Soothe2 and Bloom might be similar as both based on principles of dynamic EQ, but Spiff different as it focuses on transients
Soothe is substractive only for example
so Lol its just a multiband compressor. I mean, probably spectral compression, but whatever you know what i mean... Actually, I shouldnt hate, the biggest problem nowadays is getting spectral compression to work nicely with as little artifacts as possible, so this is where Oeksound's brilliance will show how good they are at achieving this. Nice video
To be honest, i thought it made everything sound like it was made from plastic. Might be great on certain toy sound genres. Or maybe my ears are different from other peoples, I tend to dislike what gulfoss does as well most of the time.
Agreed… but only if you use it on everything. A bit here and there where you actually have a problem and it’s amazing… but if you plaster it over every track you end up with a weird synthetic sound where nothing sounds interesting.
Wise words, I probably tested it in a too generic fashion. @@almckechnie
I think the increased harshness is actually a change in taste combined with the earbud generation having destroyed ears with the top-end missing.
So I’m guessing this just forces the signal to look more like pink noise, unless you play with the faders, when it’s pink noise plus an EQ curve.
Pretty much the Recover function in Gullfoss (where Soothe is the Tame function). I would save your money and stick with Gullfoss.
oeksound has stated that it doesnt use a reference target. if you dont already have gulfoss and are looking to drop 200 euros on an automatic dynamic EQ plugin i think this might be a compelling option, but not for me i think.
I compared between Bloom and Gullfoss. Gullfoss is dynamic EQ, Bloom isn't. It is making something additional which make track sounding nice. Gullfoss doesn't do that.
People keep saying it's not a dynamic EQ... then, what is it?
If I were pumping out product, producing or especially mixing lots of singers with their guitars, all trying to sound like each other, then $200 to have a "singer songwriter" preset, that might work elsewhere too, who knows, might then seem to be worth it. For actual me, who doesn't do any of those things, this product obviously isn't for me, but I'm still curious about what the actual functionality is, if it's NOT a dynamic EQ?
"It makes the sound bloom" isn't a functionality - it's a phrase you learn at audiophile sales camp. What does it do to the sound? In synth sound design, you can make the sound bloom via a slow attack, and set the curve of the attack for how you want it to bloom (exp, log, complex, etc). And then you would do the same with the sound's brightness, the higher harmonics, often using a filter envelope.
If you were the mixer not the producer, and couldn't program the sound to bloom at the source, then you could use a dynamic EQ, or a multiband compressor... but these are all approaching the same idea... a multiband dynamic ducker/expander. You could make a Bloom preset, a Soothe preset, or whatever, and then fine them for specific tracks as needed. Then you'd add a different reverb depending on whether you want it to bloom or smear, etc.
So then, when people tell me this ISN'T a set of expansion presets for a multiband dynamics processor, I wonder what it actually IS. That's not such a strange reaction, is it? If the software is using a different technique than the stuff I mentioned, I'd love to learn that, or at least to know about it. Someone else suggested that it could be dynamic EQ using a reference curve, such as pink noise, as the target to match. People said it's not that. Okay, then what IS it?
@@GizzyDillespee Try demo this plugin on your track. You'll be know.
Heh, great resonance compensator without any bus there, nice
Bloom on the master bus definitely loses sub bass definition. I'm not convinced by it tbh. It tends to blur everything. I am going to stick to simple EQ and multiband compression.
The most similar ones are gulfoss and equalizer curious that both are ones you didn't like. About the harshness teme I feel the same and for me Cames also from the pollution of ac current and electromagnetic fields arround us. Maybe a some sort of lower octave distortion and also that the quality of vocal booths and home studio acoustics is getting worse because more people's are investing in having one instead of going in a professional studio.
Seems similar to Soundtheory Gullfoss but with more options.
On paper yes, but in practice its nothing like Gulfoss. You have much more control over the sonic character - it can work on tracks, groups and the mixbus, and in my opinion it sounds way more natural and refined than Gullfoss. Gulfoss is also quite good, but I would pick Bloom every time over the other.
Long time Gulfoss user here, hurts to say it a bit but this plugin simply just sounds better to me, like in every way, your mileage my vary
@@maailmanalkuHave you ever tried Voxengo TEOTE or Soniformer? From what I can tell, soniformer seems like a manual version of these auto-EQ's. I've been demoing soniformer recently and the work flow manages to be quick, specific, AND complex all at the same time. Am I missing something about why it's not more universally praised or at least mentioned? I'm curious how you think it compares to the more expensive and well-known options.
I use gulfoss to unmask dialogue without sounding EQd or processed… bloom can get similar results but gulfoss is still better!
Gulfoss doesn’t give the mid side or smash or as much control, I’ve A/B’d them a lot and both have their uses
Thanks for the great video mate. Do those black dots by the frequency allow you to select the frequency, or are the frequencies fixed?
Looked like the 4 sliders also move left and right to lower or raise the center frequency of that section's bandwidth..
Frequencies are not fixed and you can do mid and side different frequencies
did you watch the video
@@whatskraken3886 yes, he did let notice so I was pointing it out politely. Thanks for stopping by though.
i think its kinda like the plugin "Sugar"
A four band multiband compressor isn't it? Mb comp are used for tone shaping i think..
Tectonic from Aberrant DSP has already done something very similar and much cheaper. The Oeksound bloom controls are easier to understand, the rest seems very the same to me
Hey there, i have noticed over the years that the harshness you are talking about often comes from gain staging issues. (Driving "analog emulations" to hard) Driving into plugins without headroom left often leads to ugly kind of digital clipping. Which is not always obvious at first. As you said it accumulates with instances of many plugins being "overdriven".
All the best, thank you for your work!
where could you put this, on an entire mix or individual tracks as well?
I’m preferring it on individual tracks or busses for sure. Master bus would be much gentler application
@@kevinkearney3836 Nice, I can see this clearing up one of my DI guitars a little more and possibly bring a freshness to the vocals
Would love to see you play with Spectral Compressor by Robbert van der Helm
It would be cool if you could solo each band to hear what it's doing.
We are incrementally handing over our creativity to algos.
ask them if using Gulfoss. By default, without cutting it, it boosts highs ( because it is stupid and does not know that there is a natural roll off there in all mixes ). Couple that with modest monitoring and we can't hear the high freq boosts. My money is on Gulfoss being the culprit!
The harshness is interesting, I also noticed this. My theory is that it could be a combination of :
- studios using low INTERNAL samplerates in their software when rendering out songs. For example, often people think bit-depth is important, and it is for plain mixing, but when using filtering, sample rate is king, and it has been shown to be much more audible (for example, compare a 12 bit track with a 24 bit track, and then a 11khz track with a 44khz track). Since many people use DAWs with long chains of filtering (EQ, effects etc), this starts to add up
- plugins using internal upsampling and downsampling. Yes that is much better than not doing so, but the problem is that every upsample and downsample creates digital artifacts. and because we want low latency, and CPU usage, you get lower accuracy. It's fine for a single VST or processor, but add a chain of 5 or more in the signal chain and things start to add up
I tested with forcing my DAW to run at a higher sample rate (using a virtual sound card), and the difference was clearly noticable to me. Of course, that does incur higher processing cost. But you can also simply do this when rendering a song. And be careful not to freeze a track before that at just 44khz...
It's just a trend and has been for many years. It's not due to the processors, it's due to the people using the processors. The average samplerate got higher, not lower. People (re)produce what they hear. If they hear very present and forward vocals on all mainstream productions, they will attempt to replicate that sound. It's illogical to me that you would assume that such VERY audible trends are due to subtle differences like 44,1kHz vs 96kHz samplerates, artifacts of oversampling, etc. I can stack 10 processors that alias (oversampled ones would be even less audible) on top of each other on the masterbus of a session that runs at 44,1kHz, if I boost 2 dB at 5kHz on a duplicate with NO aliasing in a session at 96kHz the 96kHz session will still sound harsher.
Why would you look for obvious answers in sublte places? The main sculpting of the sound in production does not come from sublte little artifacts. Everything got better. Hardware got better plugins got a LOT better, so why would there be more harsh sound due to processors now?
I think the harshness is like you said- It's a build up of OK-ness. The same thing happens in the analog realm, right? Subtle harmonics from the circuitry at each step of the process add up to something noticeable at the end.
Awesome plugin! But what a shame they didnt do an intro offering!
Everyone was/is pissed and now we all have to wait for the first sale. Created such unnecessary tension, big marketing/launch strategy fail from Oeksound imho.
Its a company I WANT to like because they do cool innovative shit, but this was just a greedy ass move...
So… while mixing, one listens to the same thing over and over again. Then anything that adds extra ’movement’ to the sound seems like a good thing. But the average listener is not listening like that. To me it seems that generally these ‘tone shapers’ produce a thin sound, and I use them cautiously.
I'm happy for my music to sound crappy and to spend my $200 on mind alteration to compensate for a lack in production, ah the good old days, nice demo though....
yes please do some more videos/research on 'harshness', i for example use two mics and even when EQ matched one is somehow harsher and i can't make technical sense out of it
with smarl changes that could be easy a nice lo-fi track
thanks