I’ve recently been messing around with Soundweaver from Boom Library and I couldn’t wait to share my thoughts with our readers.
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A Sound Review
As co-owner of Boom Box Post, I wear a lot of hats. I’m scheduled down to the 15 minute increment and often need to hyper concentrate on the task at hand. Still, I can’t control when a scheduling request or Slack message from my team will come through. Often times when I'm deep into a creative groove, I get hit with one of these important items that may not need to be handled at that exact moment, but I don’t want to forget. Distracted by the creative task at hand, I am actually quite prone to forget. I have employed various strategies to deal with it. Leaving messages unread, creating a reminder in Apple’s Reminder app or Slack, even Post-It notes. But I never had a perfect solutions. Until now.
Happy Tuesday all! Social media is a fun/popular way to get opinions about various things so we thought it would be cool to start a new thing to show off to the blog… Twitter polls! For this first one, I thought it would be cool to get opinions on various headphones that are pretty popular for editing. Check out the various headphones and poll results below!
I often times need to pitch dialogue on the mix stage. For this week’s blog post, I wanted to pit a few built in Pro Tools pitching plugins as well as some affordable alternatives against one another. Is there a one size fits all option for pitching? Do some plugins work better in certain situations than others? I’m not ashamed to say I had never taken the time to do a comprehensive head to head test until now. The results were very surprising.
Plugin Alliance recently approached me to ask if I would like to try out one of Krotos’s newest plugins, the Reformer Pro. As a big fan of Dehumanizer by Krotos, which we previously blogged about using to create alien vocals, I quickly agreed.
Not able to wait until I had time to install the plugin and really dive in, I took a few minutes between clients at work and checked out the Krotos website to see what Reformer had to offer. What I found was this description:
When Plugin Alliance asked me to try out Unfiltered Audio's newest plugin, SpecOps, before it was released to the public, I was excited. I love having the opportunity to try out new sound design tools and maybe even give valuable feedback to the maker pre-release.
So, I began, as I always do, by reading the manual. You may prefer to watch a YouTube user video, or read a blog post (hopefully, like this one!), but I’ve always been a manual gal. I love to know every last detail about how to use a new piece of software before I try it out.
Well, this manual’s first sentence is “SpecOps is the ultimate spectral processor.”
Bold statement, right? I was a bit skeptical. I like my manuals to be fact-based, and this seemed like a pretty hyped up opinion. But, after digging into it, I can honestly say that it stands up to the hype. It is the ultimate!
Unfiltered Audio’s newest plugin, Fault, has just been released, and it comes with high expectations. Plugin Alliance’s website (where you can download a full functional 14-day trial version or purchase the plugin outright) boasts Fault as a “new kind of effect,” a “pitch/mod tool [that] soothes the savage sound,” and the creator of “spectral modulation mayhem.” But what do those catchy phrases really mean? I dug into the new plugin to find out.
When it comes to vocal processing either for music or post production, engineers and producers have always needed an accessible way of augmenting their vocal tracks. iZotope’s VocalSynth ($199) is the new plugin that combines all the classic vocal sounds of the 80s and 90s. Whether you are trying to have your vocalist sound like Daft Punk, Michael Jackson, Imogen Heap, or T-Pain, or if you want to sound like an alien robot from Planet X, now you can. VocalSynth gives you the tools to do just that.
We recently discovered the wonders of SLACK here at Boom Box Post. On the surface, Slack seems like a basic messaging platform, not much to dig into. However, once we did dig in, we realized the potential power of such a streamlined platform. Slack's tagline is "Be Less Busy." And that's the real draw here. Finding ways to communicate better and faster can be such a time saver. Here's how we at Boom Box Post utilize Slack to its fullest in our Post Production workflow.
Working in post audio has been an excuse to purchase all kinds of audio toys. As one of my good friends once observed, I seem to suffer from G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). I've spent years building up an arsenal of tools to add to my creative routine, pining over the latest and greatest software, synthesizer or control interface. That said, as I grow older and more patient, I have narrowed my focus.
Which brings me to the Avid Artist Control. It had been a while since I invested in something new and frankly, I was feeling some gear-based FOMO. So I researched like crazy (a big part of the fun for me) and decided to go for it. As it turns out, this little piece of gear packs a huge punch in my day to day workflow. Here's how I've customized this beauty to utilize it's very deep skill set.
When asked by Plugin Alliance to test their newest noise reduction/reverb removal plug-in, accusonus ERA-D, my first thought was that de-noise/de-reverb is possibly the least sexy category of plug-in on the market.
However, I have to say that after putting accusonus ERA-D through its paces, it is, in fact, quite sexy.