If theres a certain energy that EQ can’t give you (or take away), Spiff has you covered.
Sometimes when you’re mixing a track there are bits of the mix that are just pesky, d’you know what I mean? Why is that vocal so clicky? The bass guitar has so much pick attack, but when you cut the frequency you lose a little bit of the love.
Maybe you want your percussion to pop through the mix a little more, but EQ isn’t quite cutting it.
Oeksound has come screaming onto the plugin scene by making the painful parts of mixing a breeze. From the makers of the much loved Soothe 2 comes Spiff.
Spiff is an adaptive transient processor that lets you boost or cut your transients in a really natural sounding way. It was originally designed to remove mouth clicks and spit from vocal recordings.
Once again Oeksound has managed to make a plugin that can’t help but have us asking, ‘how the hell have they done this’. The way Spiff manages to pull out transient information without messing up the sound of the whole source is pretty astonishing.
If you’re familiar with Soothe 2 then the user interface here will be really familiar to you. You’ve got your controls over on the left – cut or boost, sensitivity, decay and sharpness – and your sidechain EQ selector section over on the right.
Using these controls you can isolate particular bands that you want to process and decide how aggressively you want to process particular bands. And of course there’s the glorious delta control (plugin makers, take note!) which lets you hear only the difference that you are making to the signal.
Perhaps the most convincing thing about Spiff is chucking on delta and having a listen to the mouth noises that you’ve cut out of a vocal or voiceover, they sound horror movie like, and it definitely makes you glad not to have them in your track.
If you’re the kind of person that’s often editing dialogue, particularly dialogue recorded by people with poor mic technique, then this will no doubt save your audio time and time again.
We also found that if you use this nice and subtle over a whole mix (particularly an overcompressed mix) you can really get it to come alive, but be wary because it can become a little addictive.
I will say that this takes a little more finessing than Soothe 2 does. It can get a little artifacty if you push it hard, particularly on dialogue. But I was always able to manage it with a little bit of tweaking so it sounded natural.
I’ve always been a massive advocate for transient processing in a mix, and this is one of the most fully featured adaptive transient processing plugins out there.
There are certain jobs that EQ moves just can’t do, there’s a certain energy that they can’t bring and on the flip side, that they can’t take away. Oeksounds Spiff has got you covered!
You can pick up Oeksounds Spiff now for 250 AUD. If you’re keen to learn more, jump on over to their website.
