Why I stopped using FFT resonance tamers on mix and master buses

I’ve noticed that I’ve completely quit using FFT processing on stereo material. This is one of those things you never notice until you sit down and actually pay attention.

But once you do, it’s clear: resonance tamers like Soothe, Smooth Operator, SpecCraft or any others like them wreck your stereo field, and it doesn’t matter if you’re only using a touch of them.

The difference is simply too obvious for me to put them back on a mix bus, a master bus or anything carrying stereo information. The stereo image gets completely ruined.

Hear it for yourself

It really is a mess (the animation below shows the stereo image collapsing when a resonance tamer is engaged). Go and check it for yourself.

Take a master you already have and bypass Soothe or SpecCraft in the chain. Or go the other way: add it in and A/B it. It’s destructive, and it’s obvious.

The main issue with these plugins is that we overfocus on the resonance we’re fixing, and we don’t realise what the process does to the rest of the material.

Honest thoughts

I’m saying this without any hate toward the developers. I know they’re doing their best, and I was the first one to use these plugins almost religiously for many years in my own projects. But after I heard what they do, I just can’t look at them the same way.

First I dropped Soothe from my buses and master, thinking SpecCraft was the safer call. It did seem better at first, but once I compared them properly, both were doing the same kind of damage.

Big shout-out to Matt Davis, who was the first person I saw spreading the word about this, in a Facebook post.