5 ‘Intelligent’ Plugins to Make Your Mixing Life Easier

Oeksound Soothe2

A truly paradigm-shifting plugin, Soothe has found ubiquity in home and professional studios all over the world since its launch in 2016. Now at version 2, oeksound’s supernaturally effective automatic EQ qualifies as one of the most powerful utensils in any mixer’s toolbox, fully robotising the process of eradicating irksome resonances and harshness.

Essentially a dynamic EQ that boils the setup procedure down to a few quick adjustments – often nothing more than raising the big Depth knob – Soothe2 listens out for and automatically attenuates dodgy resonances in whatever source material you throw at it. The interactive response curve governs the amount of gain reduction applied across the frequency spectrum, while various other controls alter the dynamic and temporal response of the algorithm. There’s a sidechain input for ducking one signal with another, and a choice of stereo or mid/side routing; and the less aggressive Soft Mode (introduced with v2) serves as a near-universal tonal balancing solution that you might well find yourself using on almost everything in the mix.
 
https://oeksound.com/plugins/soothe2/

Soundtheory Gullfoss

Another automatic dynamic EQ, primarily intended for deployment on the mix bus, Gullfoss specifically models the human auditory system in order to steer its real-time corrective decisions, and thus offers a very different control set and operational style to other plugins of its ilk. Soundtheory’s “computational auditory perception model” is trained to identify elements in the input signal that are vying for listener attention by masking each other, so that the EQ algorithm (which adjusts itself over 300 times a second) can bring out the objective best of the sound in terms of clarity and presence. It sounds complicated because it is complicated, and Gullfoss’ interface and workflow aren’t exactly intuitive, with the central Tame and Recover parameters – between them determining the degree to which said masking is dealt with – taking some experience to get used to. Ultimately, though, this fabulous plugin rewards your patience and efforts with its unrivalled ability to transparently improve the balance and spectral consistency of mixes that need that final equalising push to get them over the line.
 
https://www.soundtheory.com/gullfoss

Sonible smart:comp 2

Austrian development house Sonible have put AI front and centre across their entire catalogue of mixing effects, from EQ and limiting to gating and de-essing, and smart:comp 2 is billed as a “spectro-dynamics compressor”, describing its ability to apply up to 2000 bands of multiband compression for tonal smoothing and balancing, along similar lines to the two EQs above. With a target Profile selected for the track or mix in question (‘Universal’, ‘Drums’, ‘Vocals’, ‘Bass’, ‘Acoustic’, ‘Hip-Hop’, ‘Pop’, etc,), you just play a few seconds of the source material into the plugin to have it set the compression Threshold, Ratio, Attack and Release parameters to get the sound as close as possible to that defined by the target Profile. The multiband Spectral Compression function is optional, and can be made more or less intense, limited in its covered frequency range, and biased towards a darker or brighter sound with the Color control. As you’d expect, an external signal can be fed in for sidechain ducking (spectral or broadband), and smart:comp 2 also features free shaping of the compression/expansion transfer function (with preset templates covering all the basics), an analogue saturation circuit, Attack and Release curve shaping, automatic input gain levelling, and mid/side and surround (5.1) processing. Genuinely ‘smart’, impressively versatile and admirably easy to use.
 
https://www.sonible.com/smartcomp2/

iZotope Neutron

iZotope’s incredible mixing suite comprises a freely reorder-able rack of processing modules including the self-explanatory Compressor, Gate, Exciter, Equalizer, Transient Shaper and Clipper, and the less obvious Density (upward compression), Phase (phase rotation and shifting) and Unmask (resolving frequency masking issues across multiple tracks). All of these are absolutely top-notch in their own individual rights but really come into their own when put under the guidance of the Mix Assistant, which draws on machine learning to build an optimal processing chain from them, targeting the sound of a preset or imported reference profile, and simplifying their collective manipulation via a handful of macro controls. Of course, you’ll invariably want to get in there and tailor the resulting channel strip in detail to get it exactly where you want it, but the suggestions provided by the Mix Assistant invariably serve as solid starting points for finessing, and the modules themselves are up there with the very best dedicated plugins in their respective categories.
 
https://www.izotope.com/en/products/neutron.html

Waves Clarity Vx DeReverb

There are few things more frustrating than being forced to abandon an otherwise-great vocal take or sample because too much reverberation from the room in which it was captured has made it into the recording. Enter Waves’ brilliant spin-off from their AI-powered Clarity Vx noise reduction plugin, making the de-reverb-ification of voice tracks literally effortless.

Clarity Vx DeReverb boasts separate neural networks for spoken dialogue and sung vocals, and having selected the appropriate network for the material at hand, you simply crank up the DeReverb knob to magically melt away as much of the ambience as you like, and wrangle the Presence slider to restore any high-end clarity that might have been suppressed along with the reverb. There’s a Pro version, too, which adds multiband processing, Tail Smoothing and more; but for the vast majority of users, the much cheaper regular one will more than suffice, doing an astonishingly good job of drying out even the wettest of vocals.
 
https://www.waves.com/plugins/clarity-vx-dereverb