A little tip for getting better "de-harsh" results, especially with Soothe (but this same tip probably applies to all other similar plugins too):The one area that I've never had any success is in "de-harshing" a track, bus or mix. Bizarrely this is where things started out for these gizmos (soothe is called "soothe" for a reason) but I've just never found it works any better than a simple eq.
Make sure you use LONG attack times. You can keep the release quite short but at the very least keep the attack long. In Soothe this means an attack of at least 5, though I very often end up with a value between 6-8.
Why? Because all of these types of plugins are dynamic plugins, meaning they change the volume of various parts of the audio, which in turn guarantees that they produce distortion (harmonics) which in turn WILL result in aliasing. Now if you are trying to remove harshness around the 3 to 12kHz region with very fast attack/release, you are creating a HUGE amount of extra harmonic content which is directly targeted at these harsh frequencies, thus you only compound the problem instead of fixing it. This is one reason why a static EQ will sometimes work much better than any form of dynamic EQ.. there are no additional harmonics created.
So to counteract and control the amount of harmonics, you use a much longer attack time. This gives you a sort of hybrid of a static and dynamic solution, vastly reducing the amount of harmonics (and thus also aliasing).
Keep in mind that even if you oversample a dynamic plugin like crazy, it will only affect the amplitude of the aliasing, it will NOT change the harmonics generated. The only control you have over amount and amplitude of harmonics is slowing down the dynamic action, especially the attack time as it's the one that creates the harmonics "on top" of the stuff you want removed.
Unfortunately very few presets seem to use these and very few users seem to be aware of the correlation between attack/release and the amount of harmonics.
In short: Use much slower attack/release times and you get better results with de-harshing in these types of plugins. In general if you find that dynamics processes add "brightness" and forwardness, it's due to the harmonic series created and it's amplitude.
Statistics: Posted by bmanic — Sat Dec 07, 2024 4:13 pm