Baby Audio’s Smooth Operator Pro delivers powerful ways of dynamically sculpting sound and applying spectral processing. To round out the offering, here are some CDM-exclusive presets. You can try them out alongside the factory presets in their free trial.
To catch you up, you can read my breakdown of what’s new in Smooth Operator Pro:
It’s one of the situations where I wrote this up, then wound up playing more with the software afterward. I just finished a few mixes that way, as I was delighted to discover the plug-in is exceptional at fitting sounds around other sounds, especially with new per-node overrides and sidechaining. I was able to rescue some mixes this way.
It’s not easy developing presets for Smooth Operator Pro, because the whole point is that what you’re doing is dependent on the source material. But I’m impressed with the full range of tools Baby Audio has included, developed no doubt by people who are better mixers than I am. (Ahem. I’m a musicologist, Jim.) The presets make for some great what-if scenarios, and then if you find something that’s in the approximate direction of what you need, you can easily adjust the frequency bands and overall reduction.
The built-in presets emphasize more conventional instruments and mix bus work. (Impressively, Smooth Operator Pro can sometimes work on a mix bus!) I wound up with a couple of patches that worked well on dense synth parts, and I decided to fill in what was missing – sidechain presets!
And sidechaining is a whole lot of fun. This doesn’t just act like a sidechained compressor; you can build something more transparent and adaptive. Now, part of the reason Baby Audio probably didn’t put in so many sidechain presets is that the patches won’t work without sidechaining configured, so – be warned. That’s what the “SC” is about. (Not Sports Center, not Second City Television, not Star Craft.) Note also “Remnants” is designed to highlight only the reduced bands, which creates some cool effects.
Download here (grab the entire download):
CDM-sop.zbaby [Smooth Operator Pro Pack]
You can then import the pack via the button at the top left of the presets window:
Oh, from comments, there’s a reminder that it’s worth keeping the v1, non-Pro version around (thanks, Freeks; I had forgotten about this):
The first version had a nice bug: it distorted sinewave subs in correct way. Bug was so nice, that when they fixed it, you could still select the old version from the menu.
Enjoy!
Now I was going to say I don’t want to add a demo video, because you should really just experiment and try these presets on your material and see what happens. But… it’s nice watching the UI animate, so here it is with some very silly Roland Cloud-based materials. (The drums are treated with some Roland presets I also designed.)
There is something to demonstrate here, though: one, that you can sidechain a really dense sound in a way a conventional sidechain compressor wouldn’t, and two, that you can make a sort of OTT-style compressor, as well.
Let me know how it goes, and yes, you can also share presets with friends this way. It’d be fun if we all did more of that.
Smooth Operator Pro is available on sale now (intro pricing) at Plugin Boutique:
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