The Roam Office

For quite a while, Klevgrand Brusfri was my go-to denoiser plugin, and I still highly recommend it. It was also my introduction to Klevgrand, the Swedish music software company who has become one of my favorite sources of inspiration.

A year or two ago, Solid State Logic released a really fun Halloween special plugin for free, called X-Orcism II, which does a fantastic job of making you sound like a ghoul in a crypt. It seems to do some compression and distortion, along with some pretty dramatic pitch shifting and a sprinkle of howling wind noise added in. You get a fun range of slightly spooky to downright unintelligible.

I gotta admit, this is going to be one of my most biased posts, since I love these headphones so much. Most days, I put them on in the morning, and they stay on my head all day. When I’m not using them, I just forget they are there (hence them staying there even when I’m done working for the day), but they are conveniently ready to go when I want them. This isn’t really a proper review, and is more just me talking about something I love.

While I dabble in music production and love to nerd out about audio engineering, the fact is that the vast majority of my actual use for this stuff revolves around remote work, especially while traveling. This dual life gives me a somewhat unique perspective on audio hardware and software.

A while back, I stumbled across Native Vocalstrip 2 by SSL. Like most channel strips, it’s intended to be a fairly comprehensive mix of the most commonly used tools, but it’s targeted specifically at vocals and speech. If you’re wanting to trim the fat a bit on your vocal processing chain, this is a solid choice (it’s lived in my chain for most the last two years!).