It’s deceptively simple it feels less like a single tool and more like a whole way of working with your source material – especially when you figure in sidechaining. There are some great presets in there, too, which are a nice way of nudging you in a particular direction. You normally crank it to 70-90% but this is also capable of some unique results across its range, depending on the source material FOCUS – “granularity/intensity” of the spectral algorithm is how Baby describes it.SOLO per-node for each portion of the spectrum.Effect level of a particular frequency, with slope/Q (as on an EQ).That pretty interface gives you a number of controls: I also found some situations where I might get a particular form of precise control beyond what my favorite EQ and compressor might give me. Oooh.Īnd I do encourage you to be extreme with the UI, as I found all sorts of wild accidents. But it is also a compressor, so if you drag a node to the extreme, instead of filtering the sound, you get all sorts of lovely frequency-domain compression. So yes, like an EQ, Smooth Operator does give you a live visualization of your sound spectrum and some draggable nodes you can use for parametric control of frequency. But there’s no particular reason for that hard distinction in the digital domain. This is amusing to me, of course, because I’ve several times over written background text (and once an entire textbook) where I treat these things as separate categories. That makes sense, because digital software is capable of translating to and from a frequency domain – which in turn is intuitive to your über-gestalt brain. The best way to understand Smooth Operator – and tools like it – is that it’s both of those at once. Normally we talk about frequency-domain tools (like EQ) and time-domain (like compressors, limiters, and expanders). It’s really everything a digital audio tool should be – that hands-on, sound-shaping feeling that a computer works a bit like your imagination. You get something that can be a precise tool for mastering and equalization and compression alongside your conventional interfaces, but that can also be pushed to its very limit for creative re-imagining of sound material. “Signal balancer” is another term for this, but it’s fluid enough that you can also throw things out of balance in nice ways.Īnd, wow, does it work. The basic conceit here is to take spectral processing – translating a sound into an FFT for all-at-once real-time processing – out of the domain of just doing audio restoration and into something creative and fun. This seems to be an EQ, right? One that is apparently very into pastels? And I also admit that I’m wary of plug-ins these days that boast lots of “smart” features to try to dumb down conventional audio tools that work perfectly well.īut look closer, because Smooth Operator is actually none of that. Okay, I know what the first glance at this looks like. Smooth Operator is a unique new way of reaching out and sculpting sound at the spectral level – and it’s terrifically addictive and creative.
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