REQ: Oeksound Bloom [WIN]

find your tone with bloom
Bloom is 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. It also lets you shape the tone and character of a track, for example, by adding warmth, brightness, or clarity. Tonal adjustments made with Bloom are dynamic and context-aware. This, together with its carefully designed user interface, makes the plug-in quick and intuitive to use and helps keep the material sounding natural, even when making radical changes.

fits the occasion
Bloom boosts and cuts frequencies only when needed, helping to mitigate energy build-ups and reveal more detail. It lets you make tonal changes quickly while being considerate of the source material. For example, you can boost the high-end on vocals without emphasizing unwanted sibilance. With Bloom, bright doesn’t need to mean shrill, and big doesn’t need to mean boomy. Use it to shape tone with confidence.

starting point or finishing touches
Bloom can work as a good starting point when shaping a sound. Useful for quickly crafting single tracks towards a cohesive mix, it’s also equally functional as a bus processor, whether for sculpting groups or sensitively shaping a master. Get your mix up to speed effortlessly, or dive deeper to bring that exact sound you envisioned to life.

make it personal
A good mix is not one-size-fits-all. Bloom can do a lot of the heavy lifting, but at the end of the day, it’s your ears that decide what’s right. Bloom’s four tone controls allow you to shape the tone freely to your liking. The controls change the overall tonal balance Bloom is working towards rather than making absolute cuts or boosts, as found in an EQ. This way, you can reach your vision fast without needing to compensate for bigger moves or automate around problems.

squash sounds into shape
When bolder moves are needed, crank Bloom’s amount control to engage squash mode. With squash engaged, Bloom applies frequency-dependent upward and downward compression to reduce the dynamic range of the signal and mold it towards the specified shape. Use it to subtly bring out detail or dramatically over-emphasize it, adding grit without saturation.

so… what is it exactly?
In addition to being a quick broad-strokes EQ tool, Bloom can be thought of as our take on a color box. It can give character, glue, or grit to your sound in a way that fits your vision. You might use it in place of a dynamic EQ, multiband compressor, saturator, or even compressor, but it falls under none of these categories. We call it an adaptive tone shaper.

our process behind bloom — three questions
The idea for Bloom came from research questions we’ve studied since 2018. The initial research question was, What is warmth in audio? and later in an unrelated venture, we studied the question: What is presence? Both led us down a rabbit hole involving the balance of overtone series and a third research question: How do we bring out and balance overtones present in a sound? This was the basis for Bloom’s first prototypes, and from there, Bloom started to take form as a tone shaper.

Two years of critical listening followed, leading to numerous prototypes and thousands of incremental improvements to the DSP. A lot of this process is about seeing how the plugin reacts to different sound sources and iterating until it behaves in the way we want it to.

In parallel, we spent a lot of time testing how to present the idea to the user in an approachable way. After testing users’ interactions with different designs, we landed on one that not only felt the best but also helped us and our testers make the best-sounding decisions. One of the bigger challenges of Bloom was giving the user all the control they need while making sure the plug-in is still fun to work with.

The end result is something novel and far more complex than we initially imagined. But Bloom still follows our ethos. It offers new ways to manipulate audio, presented in an approachable manner.