Review: Bloom from Oeksound

There are no silver bullets when it comes to audio plugins. This feels like something a wise old engineer with decades of experience would say and I largely believe that to be true. But increasingly there are companies making plugins that seem to challenge that argument. One company at the forefront of this has to be Oeksound because Soothe was a real game changer and does feel like a silver bullet a lot of times. Now we have an all-new entrant from the stables of Oeksound… Bloom. They call it an “adaptive tone shaper” which is code for “it does a lot of stuff for you”. Does it stay in tune with Oeksound’s reputation? Let’s find out!

An adaptive tone shaper. It analyzes the character of a signal and applies corrections to the perceived tonal balance for a more even and refined sound.

Oeksound

Pretty in Pink 

Oeksound has spent a lot of effort to establish its own UI style and design with Soothe and Spiff. It is familiar, beautiful and extremely elegant. This time they’ve strayed away from their usual hues of blue and gone for a nice hot pink. The UI feels highly gamified and is a real joy to use. 

Apart from the toolbars at the top and bottom, there are three main sections to this plugin. The first is the Main section starting with the huge Amount knob that every Oeksound plugin has. This one has an extra little bar stuck to its end to show you the amount of Squash you are adding. You then have Attack and Release.

Next, we have the Tone Control section. This has a 4-band split with the ability to set crossovers, solo bands and bypass bands. This does feel and look like an EQ but it is doing a lot more under the hood than your standard EQ. We’ll get to that shortly. 

Below the Tone Control section, we have the Processing Graph to show you all the stuff that Bloom is doing to your audio in real-time. It is quite mesmerising! It also has a bunch of filters that let you leave portions of the signal unaffected by the plugin. 

The Toolbar at the top is your standard preset dropdown menu along with Undo, Sidechain listen etc…The bottom toolbar has some interesting stuff for you. There is a Quality menu that lets you adjust the quality of processing depending on your CPU’s appetite. You can also put the plugin in Mid/Side or Stereo mode with the Stereo Mode feature.

The novel one here is the Squash cal button. You can use this as a sensitivity button for the compressor. It almost automatically figures out and sets an appropriate level. It is interesting to note that it does this based on the LUFS levels rather than peak or RMS. The Wet Trim also matches input and output levels based on LUFS which I found to be far more impressive than it ought to be. Why doesn’t everything have this?!

Quick Fix King

Let’s start by throwing Bloom on something. What does it actually do? Think of a plugin chain where you have Soothe to remove all your unwanted resonances, then you do a bit of compression, use something like Gulfoss by Soundtheory to do some adaptive EQ, some saturation if necessary, overall boosts, cuts… Bloom does this all in one single plugin. 

More than a magic wand that can do things nothing else can, this is a plugin that saves a ton of time for you.

The default settings are great most of the time. Even if they do say so themselves! They are settings that will work to remove the most common problems with less than ideal sources – harshness, low mid boom, scratchy highs. On top of the removal, you can greatly improve the source by reshaping the tone to where you would like it to be. The tone-shaping section allows you to add more or less of each band.

It is important to note that it doesn’t just do this like a dumb EQ, it never stops analysing your signal. It makes informed decisions every second for each of the band to help shape the tone to where you want it to be. It makes cuts and boosts and then automatically internally compensates the levels to make it seamless and transparent.

You can then add a bit of dynamic control – both upward and downward compression to further enhance things. This plugin applies frequency-dependent compression tailored to model the equal-loudness contour. For the frequency ranges where the ear is least sensitive, squash compression has a harder knee and higher threshold and where the ear is more sensitive, squash compression has a softer knee and lower threshold.

This means that you are achieving what you want from your compression in terms of audible results but you aren’t crushing your signal more than it needs to be crushed. The threshold can also be automatically determined by the Squash Cal feature that automatically adjusts based on the LUFS. You can push the Squash more and more for drastic and coloured processing. 

Personal Thoughts

I find myself reaching for this tool when I have a source that needs a lot of work, especially poorly recorded tracks. This seems to be a great way to quickly get something to sound much better. It also seems to be an amazing tool for sound design. It extends your sample library by allowing you to shape sounds aggressively and quickly.

Like almost all the Oeksound plugins, it is an amazing vocal shaping tool. It eliminates the need for a huge chain with very many plugins. The Squash feature is a great way to add some parallel heft to stuff like drums and bass. A big shoutout to Oeksound for some of the best presets of any plugin manufacturer. There is a right preset for almost everything you need to do and you’ve gotta love the names they have as well. 

Find out more about Oeksound Bloom