Nick Emerson’s Post

Transcript

Hey guys, how's it going? I wanted to just share real quick how you can use Soothe 2 to denoise monster vocalizations. Now you can use this in other applications. I find that it's sort of hit and miss with what it works with, but I'll show you why I use it in this way and sort of explain that. But if you're not familiar, Soothe 2 is. A really cool plugin that can remove harshness, which tends to come in the form of tonal frequencies, especially like in the musical context. It could work really good on symbols or acoustic guitars, which often have a lot of frequency build up and ringing depending on the guitar, but and it also works really good for de essing. Vocals. But. In the introduction of Soothe 2. They added a delta button which flips sort of what you're monitoring and it lets you hear what the plugin is taking away. And removes what you are normally hearing. So for example. Let me just. Show you what I have, and again, I'm going to demonstrate this on how I'm using how I've been using this on monster vocalizations. I had some screaming that I did a couple takes of and then I transposed them down by 12 semitones and sounds like this. OK, so. When we make these kind of sounds. We tend to want to add more and more thicken it up, especially things that we want to sound scary. But. It can reach a point where it's not gonna fit in the mix, and I'm speaking specifically for video games where. Especially in games that there's a lot of things happening, we don't want too much noise because it builds up the noise floor and muddies everything up, so this is sort of a way to work around that. So I did want to thicken it up a little bit, so I'm using trash. To push the harmonic distortion and let's see what that sounds like. Now that sounds cool, but as you noticed, there's a lot of noise introduced from that. So what we're going to do? Is enable this instance of sooth. Which I have some very aggressive settings on. I switched it to hard mode and depth is quite a bit all the way U goes up to 18. I got it at 14.4. I have the sharpness up all the way. What's that's what that's good for is. Sort of triangulating on specific frequencies. Actually the visualizer is very good at kind of showing this all the way down. You can see it. Everything's kind of clumped together. And as I increase it, see. It's picking out specific frequencies and then there's the selectivity. Just this is sort of. As it says, being more selective on what frequencies it's it's picking, but generally speaking I use this as sort of a tone shaper. Sometimes it sounds better down or up depending on the. The material you're working with, but this is fine for for this use. I also cut out some of the high stuff since I was like a big monster. The idea of this this isn't for anything, these are just takes for demonstration purposes, but. When I pitched something down by 12 semitones, generally going for a large creature, so emphasizing the lows and cutting out some of the highs just for tone shaping. Umm, so what's happening here is. I bypass this, we'll listen again. And if I enable it in normal mode, meaning not delta. You can hear, you can hear all that noise and a lot of the body, which is the tonal stuff is being taken away because I have very aggressive settings on. This is not normally how you would use this if you're trying to use it in its normal application of simply taming harshness, but if you flip it around. You get all of that cool tonal character and remove a lot of the noise that comes with it, especially from the instance of trash that's introducing even more harshness. With it. So that's pretty cool. I often take it a step further and add another layer of soothe. And I use this in the normal mode, not in delta and I just am sort of taming a little bit more of the high frequencies. So. This is everything that's on it. And then we'll listen 4. So yeah, it it can introduce some some minor artifacting. It can introduce some major artifacting actually. Especially if you're not doing it correctly, but even if you are, it might not get you the results you're looking for exactly. So it's a very experimental kind of process, but I think for getting a very aggressive sound while trying to tame some of the noise that comes with it, I think this does a pretty good job. Especially the second one you can hear. It's very, very noisy at the beginning. A very gravely And then I do that. And you're hearing a lot more of the tonality of that and less of that harsh, noisy stuff. So yeah, this is just an idea of way to clean up some monster vocalizations for your games. And yeah, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, happy designing.