Klevgrand Brusfri
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.
Brusfri
As I stated in my Clear review, when you’re using a decent mic for remote work, noise is your biggest foe. A good mic will pick up air conditioners, people walking around, and the million other little bumps, scratches, whooshes, hums, a buzzes that surround us. Out brains filter those out really well in day-to-day life, but the become very apparent as soon as you lose the small visual and aural cues your brain uses to decide what sounds are and are not important. A denoiser plugin is a magic little thing that sets an army of fairies to work to remove all those little sounds, leaving you with a clean and professional sound. They can use a variety of different techniques to achieve this (most of which, I won’t even pretend to understand), but Brusfri’s method is simple and effective: according to Klevgrand, it uses a collection of carefully tuned expanders to filter out noise without sounding unnatural or introducing wierd audible artifacts.
Klevgrand, a company named after the alley in Stockholm in which they began, has created a wide range of interesting and quirky plugins. Their products run the range from relative simple and straight-forward EQs like GotoEQ to the innovative and unusual Tomofon synthesizer. Their stuff nearly always sounds founds fantastic and has a simple, clean interface that is easy to use. Brusfri is no exception.
The UI
The UI is broken up into three simple sections.
On the left, you have the basic noise reduction controls, including the attack, threshold, and release settings. You also get a simple lookahead toggle, which letes it look 20ms into the future to handle things like drum sounds. You can use the controls here to adjust how hard it’s working, and how quickly to starts and stops doing its thing. Somewhat unintuitively, the threshold control feels a little backwards to me, but the UI explains it nicely: you lower the threshold to reduce the noise more. I find that the default threshold of 0% works pretty well, but I like to raise it up to 10-15%, to sound a bit more natural. I also turn off lookahead, since the 20ms of latency that it introduces isn’t worth it to me. I usually don’t bother with any other controls.
In the middle, you have the all-important giant learn button. All you do is stay quiet and hold the button down for a second or two. If the noise around you changes (for me, it’s usually an air conditioner turning on or off), you just do it again to learn the new noise profile.
To the right of that, you have the “tonality” section, for when you need to tweak things a bit. The smooth control adjusts the expander ratios, to adjust exactly how much noise is removed when the signal drops below the noise threshold. SC-HPF adjusts the side-chain high-pass filter, which changes how it handles the lower frequencies. Treble does exactly what it says on the label: it boosts the higher frequency content after removing noise. Gain adjusts the output volume after the noise has been reduced. Finally mix is the usual mix control, adjusting the mix between the unprocessed and processed signals.
Along the top of the UI is a handy little box which tells you what everything does when you hover the mouse over it. That little box is the only reason I don’t immediately start adjusting the threshold control backwards every time. There’s also some controls for saving and loading presets, but honestly, I wouldn’t bother. Finding and loading a preset file would take about as long as it takes to just set the whole thing up from scratch.
Why it’s great for remote work
Three reasons: with lookahead turned off, it’s zero-latency; it does an amazing job; and it’s incredibly simple to set up quickly.
For me, it’s especially well-suited for working at home (vs travel) because I can simply map a button on a MIDI controller to the “learn” button to quickly re-learn my environment’s noise. Fair warning, though: when it’s learning noise, it doesn’t do any noise reduction at all. If you are unmuted in a meeting, you might accidentally blast everyone with noise. For that reason, I tend to set up a macro in my DAW, to mute me while Brusfri is learning.
When traveling (so most of the time), I don’t have a MIDI controller handy, so I have to actually go click a button, which isn’t ideal.
One trick I found to make this less of an issue is to use multiple denoiser plugins. I put one that doesn’t need to learn a noise profile (I use iZotope’s RX Voice De-noise put into Adaptive mode. On its own, it doesn’t sound great when it’s set up to remove all noise, but it works decently when you need a lighter touch) with its noise reduction settings dialed down enough to sound okay, followed by Brusfri. The first one takes care of most of the heavy lifting and evens out the really obvious noise, providing Brusfri with a more stable noise profile to deal with. If you’re not constantly dealing with changing noise, though, I would just go with Brusfri on its own.
Another great thing about Brusfri, which I’ve never taken advantage of, but really want to, is Tula Mics. Klevgrand teamed up with Tula on their travel mic, and the thing as Brusfri built in to the mic itself! It’s specifically targeted at musicians and digital nomads, making it a nearly perfect fit for me. I’m already sold on Brusfri, and building the learn button into the mic itself would really boost its usability. If I had a spare $280 lying around (for the mic + dead cat bundle), I’d buy one in an instant (hey Klevgrand and/or Tula, I’m open to bribes here!).
You already said Supertone Clear is the best for remote work, so why bother with Brusfri?
Unlike Clear, Brusfri can operate with zero latency, which is huge. Clear does a better job and doesn’t make you learn the noise profile, but it also introduces 24.5ms of latency; it’s the single biggest contributer of latency in my whole processing chain.
The other major consideration is that Clear is basically useless for anything besides the human voice. If you’re like me, and you like to dabble in music production, Clear just won’t cut it. If you want to clean up a noisy guitar or synth recording, you’re out of luck. Brusfri can handle those situations better than anything else I’ve ever tried.
One other thing to bear in mind is that Brusfri is cheaper. It’s regular price is $60 (as of December 2025), occasionally dropping to around $35 on sales. Klevgrand also tends to partner with other companies and offer their stuff for free; there’s actually a pretty good chance I got it for free. Something like Clear, on the other hand, starts at $100 and drops to the $50-60 range during sales.
Overall impressions
If you don’t feel like paying the premium price for Clear, want to remove noise from more than just vocals, or just want to support an awesome company, the Brusfri is absolutely worth picking up. Grab a copy here. It’s a bit of a no-brainer.