Alternative uses for soothe and spiff

Masters Q&A Q&A Oeksound
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I was curious if over time you have found some things that u use soothe and spiff for for - other than the functions that we all love using them for - that you feel worth sharing?

The plugins are for sure on the very surgical side of things at first glance until i went deeper and started playing around with them etc.

Any exciting / creative discoveries?:slight_smile:

Thank you!

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There sure is a world of emergent possibilities that can be explored with our plug-ins! Even the classic Soothe trick of sidechaining the instrumental to frequency-specifically duck the vocals was something discovered by our users and wasn’t really in our original spec.

I’m definitely going to create some videos about some of these tricks on our Youtube channel but so far one of my favorites has been using Spiff to split the drum bus into transient and sustain components. This one works great on most DAWs, but Pro Tools might run out of delay compensation, especially if you like to use a lot of plugins and complicated routings. The recipe goes as follows:

  • Instead of sending your drum bus to the 2bus, send it to two parallel auxes instead.
  • On the first aux track (keep the second one muted for now), load up Spiff on Cut mode and engage the Delta.
  • Use the controls to set Spiff so that you’ll catch the main transients: Keep the sensitivity curve quite flat and play with the decay to really get the full spectrum and length of the transients.
  • Once you’re happy with the transients you’re hearing, copy this instance of spiff into the other aux track and disengage the delta. (Remember to unmute this bus now!) Don’t change any other settings without adjusting the other instance to match.
  • The first aux (with delta engaged) is your transient bus and the second aux (with delta disengaged) is your sustain bus.

Why do this split? Well, you can now saturate your transients a lot more without risk of making your drums’ fundamentals all messed up and farty.

My favorite thing is to send to a drum reverb from the transients only. Because we’re now sending the summed transients (close mics summed with OHs and rooms) the reverb is going to sound a lot more natural. Normally we’re sending drums from close mics to reverbs, right? But we want to usually keep those quite bright and defined, so the reverb ends up sounding splashy and needs some pre or post EQ, or a certain algorithm to mitigate that. Also, by sending just the transients to a reverb, we can use longer reverb times to create some bigger space before the reverb starts to wash out everything.

I can come back and write up some more techniques later during this week-long Q&A. That being said, if any users want to share their techniques in the replies, that would be awesome! I’m sure there are some tricks that even we aren’t aware of.

-Villberg

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Here’s another trick closely related to the previous one on Spiff: You can actually remove reverb from your percussion loops and drums by doing the transient isolation described before (Spiff in delta). This time you don’t need any fancy routing, just put Spiff on your track since we don’t want to keep the sustain part (=the reverb). Just use the Decay knob to set the length of how much sustain you want to capture.

-Villberg

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Villberg!

Thank you so much! Definitely gonna try them out!

What is also nice is sidechaining the delta of de-esser (off a send of the original track) like pro-ds to soothe and use soothe as a very frequency specific de esser so you don‘t loose things you don‘t want to loose with a de esser :slight_smile:

a

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That’s a great idea! Splitting esses and only treating them with soothe is a very surgical way to use it!

For anyone wondering about the general usefulness of soothe as a De-Esser, I’ve actually recently released this video: Is Soothe a de-esser on our youtube channel. The special thing about Alon’s approach is that a de-esser plug-in is being used first to determine what parts of the signal are considered sibilance and passed on to soothe. This way you can set soothe to act more aggressively without worrying about it eating in to the tonal parts of the signal. This is a more advanced approach to my video, where I basically advise trying to turn the esses down before compression to avoid slamming them too hard and thus creating problems.

-Villberg

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