Oeksound Celebrates 10 years of Soothe Plug In
Mellowing the Harsh: oeksound celebrates a decade of chain-changing Soothe plug-ins
In just ten years, oeksound’s flagship plug-ins Soothe and Soothe2 have landed in the vocal chains and mix buses of nearly every high-profile producer and engineer working today. From pop to progressive metal to classical, Soothe has changed the way people record voices, guitars, drums, and much more.
Despite Soothe’s omnipresence today, the plug-in and oeksound have humble grassroots beginnings. Ten years ago, Olli Keskinen, an experienced audio engineer with a degree in programming and music technology, discovered that top-tier mixing engineers were often going over vocal takes and adjusting the EQ syllable by syllable. This labor intensive step, Keskinen thought, was ripe for automation. He used his insight as a front-of-house sound engineer with a background in digital signal processing to create his first plug-in.
And that’s how the first iteration of Soothe came to be. Keskinen designed Soothe to work similar to a dynamic EQ or de-esser plug-in, but with far more going on “under the hood.” As dynamic resonance suppressors, Soothe in all its variations takes the edge off of potentially jarring moments in performances. Meant to reduce pesky resonances from close-miced sound sources such as vocals, guitars, woodwinds, and violins, Soothe cuts back on these frequencies without impacting adjacent ones, maintaining clarity.Â
“Due to the chaotic radiation patterns of the instruments, and multiplied by the pickup patterns of the microphones, nastiness is likely to be present when sticking a microphone a few inches from a sound source,” Keskinen explained to Music Tech in 2017, when the plug-in first caught on. "Soothe is at its best when used as the first line of defence to treat these problematic sound sources, saving the mixing engineer a lot of time and frustration trying to get the stuff to sit in the mix, especially with the lead parts."
Soothe saved hours of painstaking work, filling a gap that no other plug-in or tool had managed. "I was already tackling this problem before Soothe came out, and spending too long doing these surgical cuts,” recalls Dave Otero, metal producer and mix engineer. “And it's just so much harder to do that when that task takes an hour. With Soothe, you can get there in the first one or two minutes."
Creating this time-saving plug-in was no easy task. Working on his own, Keskinen devoted years to creating a solution that would automate the syllable-by-syllable approach, drawing on his computer science experience. He succeeded, developed the first version of Soothe, and eventually posted it to Gearspace.Â
It was picked up by Greg Wells, the Canadian producer and songwriter, who sang its praises. This support took Soothe viral. “If the person praising you has clout, many people in our industry will start to believe in the product,” Keskinen observed in a 2025 Finnish interview. “Wells did exactly what I developed the product for,” and others took notice.
Wells, who has worked with Timbaland, Adele, and Katy Perry among others, agrees: “I luckily was an early adopter of Soothe. I have enthusiastically shared with anyone that would listen how great I knew it was.”
This stroke of luck and community enthusiasm, built on a high-caliber product that answered a real need, was followed by another trend that made Soothe plug-ins indispensable. Oeksound released Soothe2 in 2020, right as COVID-19 was sweeping the world. The plug-in proved perfect for at-home recording environments, helping smooth out the raw edges musicians and producers encountered as they switched from pro studios to humbler surroundings in lockdown.Â
Heba Kadry (Bjork, Slowdive, The Mars Volta, Ryuichi Sakamoto) calls Soothe2 her “golden solution” because it “attenuates the issues while self-adjusting to whatever else is going on in the same frequency range sounds so natural” even when the mastering engineer has no access to stems or a multitrack.
Soothe became a ubiquitous tool to make demo and home recordings feel polished, to bring out their best, while remaining a cornerstone of mixes in professional studio settings. “oeksound were really lucky, because Soothe2 became a phenomenon among engineers and producers working at a very high level,” Keskinen reflects. “Because of this, it has had a significant impact on what we all listen to. When we hear music on the radio or Spotify nowadays, it’s more likely than not that the song has gone through Soothe.”Â
Like pitch correction/Autotune, Soothe has become an essential part of the majority of professionals’ workflows for vocals, guitars, pianos, and drums, with engineers coming up with new ways to apply Soothe all the time. “oeksound’s plugins find their way into every mix of mine,” says Adam “Nolly” Getgood (Periphery, Devin Townsend, Animals as Leaders, Haken). “They’re irreplaceable tools that greatly affect the listenability and clarity of my mixes.”
Throughout Soothe’s widespread adoption, however, oeksound has remained devoted to quality and to the professional community it serves. “Our mission is still the same as it was when oeksound was founded, even if our team is now bigger,” says Atte Karm, Marketing Director at oeksound. “We aim to create tools that solve real problems for audio professionals. Reliably good-sounding algorithms and an intuitive user interface are a must so that pros can work quickly, so they are deeply ingrained in our work.”Â
Engineers and producers agree. Thousands of them turn to Soothe for a stunning array of projects and sounds, from feats of metal prowess to tight boy-band harmonies to instruments rich in resonances such as the sitar and sarangi. As Skrillex put it, “Soothe saves me sooo much time. So simple yet dynamic."
Originally developed by Finnish engineer and programmer Olli Keskinen, Soothe was designed to automate the painstaking, syllable-by-syllable EQ moves used by top mixers. Functioning as an intelligent dynamic resonance suppressor, it reduces problematic frequencies without affecting the surrounding tone.
