PSP MixTreble

Let say that, despite the fact that it isn't a brand new product at the time these lines are written, it is undoubtedly of a brillant conception if, like me, you're into sound design (i would say even more precisely : sample design) as a skilled amateur or a professional, you will really love such a well-concieved tool to manipulate the details of the hi-end contour of any of your audio files (either master tracks or single samples inside a sound library) with an unsuspected flexibility, .

This involving four successive stages that, assuming you have downloaded the trial version, i won't detail all the included parameters that if needed, you might have studied though the user manual easily, so let me just describe the whole process chain here briefly.

First a hiss remover, noise reduction system working at the crucial frequency bandwidth (from hi-end to 500hz) to be then treated by the following stages. Second a, so to say « transient enhancer » ...a bit mysterious for me but very effective stage to determine and enhance the formant frequencies of a voice or any acoustic instruments and signals. Third a stereo enhancer and finally the harmonics section based on a classic but very cleverly conceived exciter, plus an « output saturation » switch at the very-end of the chain as an option to prevent signal peaks.

To be honest, in practice i had time after time the tendency to favour some stages and neglect some others, something that could be perfectly considered as a bad habit. not that these stage where useless (as the proverb goes « Bad workers always have bad tools »), just because there is one kind of process involving the combination of the two first sections, in where this plugin totally shines.

Indeed : suppose you've got for instance an afuche/cabasa (or a guiro) percussion on a track, depending the way you're adjusting both « hiss remover » and « transient » section, you can modify with a great flexibility the harmonic contour and textures of such instruments, making the sounding friction (of course) brighter but also smoother or sharper with a bunch of possible nuances, this mainly due to the combination of the threshold's opening/closing speed of the (improperly called in the case) hiss remover before overall formant frequencies enhancement.

...if you're into field soundtakes the same process can be applied for instance, with all possible locust and grasshopper's stridulations. independently of the brightness of the source, it can litterally smooth out any rubbing, creaking, warbling, gurgling, etc... or in the contrary increase such reliefs with many possible variations, keeping perfectly a natural feel to all these sound sources.

So in summary : a must have for high-end contour modeling, whatever is the purpose.

(complemented with both Mixbass2 and especially, Mixsaturator2, for low end polishing, all being part of the mix pack)