Posts

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.

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!).

When dealing with audio, particularly with remote work, you need to route your processed microphone audio from your DAW (or other plugin host) to your meeting softare (Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, etc). You can, of course, use your mic directly in the meeting software, but that’s no fun! I want to process it a bit, to clean things up, make it louder, and generally shape my sound.

If you’re serious about your meeting audio, the bottom line is this: Supertone Clear is, without a doubt, the best vocal denoiser for remote work.

Before we hit the road, my WFH setup at home had a large diaphragm on a boom clamped to the desk. I was able to position it close to my mouth while still sitting barely off-camera. It’s a pretty great setup that doesn’t work even remotely well for life on the road.