Soothe3: oeksound rebuilds the plugin half the industry mixes through

Ten years after the original Soothe quietly changed how records deal with harshness, Finnish developer oeksound has shipped the third version, and it’s a ground-up rebuild rather than a facelift. Soothe became the default answer to resonant vocals, spiky cymbals and boxy acoustic guitars because it finds and reduces resonances dynamically instead of forcing you to notch them by hand. Soothe3 keeps that job description and rewrites the engine underneath.

The headline change is a split into two processing modes. Soft mode uses an adaptive threshold that tracks the incoming level, making it far harder to accidentally strangle a dynamic vocal; oeksound calls it the most transparent suppression it has released. Hard mode keeps the fixed-threshold behaviour of Soothe2, including the compressor-like grab that people learned to use as a creative effect. The second big addition is a low-latency mode: zero samples of delay at base sample rates and roughly a millisecond at higher ones, which finally makes Soothe practical while tracking and in live or broadcast chains rather than only at mixdown.

Workflow got a pass too. A single Detail parameter replaces Soothe2’s separate sharpness and selectivity controls, tilt controls scale attack, release and detail across the spectrum, a max-cut parameter keeps the deepest reductions in check when you drive it hard, and multichannel support now extends to 9.1.6 Atmos layouts. Early word from working engineers has been unusually unanimous: the rebuild sounds cleaner pushed hard, and it’s been replacing v2 in professional templates since it landed in May.

Soothe3 costs $259/€229/£199 in VST3, AU and AAX, with a $55 upgrade from any earlier version and a 20-day trial.

Producer’s note

Put resonance suppression before your compressor, not after. If the compressor sees the resonances first, it reacts to them and drags the whole level down with every spike; tame them upstream and the compressor finally gets to work on the performance instead of the problem.