Is this new plugin worth $209? And more importantly, can it do things that I can't already do
with my current plugins? I've been testing the
free trial of this plugin for a few days now - this
isn't sponsored at all, so lemme show you what this thing can do and at the end, I'll let you know if I'm gonna buy it or not. I've always gotten the
name of this company wrong. I used to call them O-E-K Sound and then I saw a YouTube
comment that said it's supposed to be pronounced O-K sound. So then I started calling it that, but it turns out it's
actually pronounced O-EK sound. Anyway, they just released
this new plugin called Bloom and I was excited to check it out because this company
makes my favorite mixing plugin called Soothe. You guys have definitely seen
me use it on this channel, but what the hell does this new plugin do? So there's really two parts
to it. The first part is tone. If I run some pink noise through it, you can see it's just trying to
flatten the frequency range. So this can be a good
thing or a bad thing. Let's try it with this organ sound. So with an organ, you don't really need the
frequencies up here or down there, but it's trying to flatten
the whole frequency range. So it's really boosting those frequencies. But obviously that's why they
let you control the range with these parameters here. But you know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of a multi-band compressor. If we look at it side by side
with a multi-band compressor, you can see you can get
pretty similar results to shape the tone. So the second part of this plugin is time. Let's add it to this rim shot. So anytime you have a punchy sound, the attack is gonna be a
lot louder than the tail. So when you add Bloom, it's
gonna really reduce the attack and accentuate the tail. That's why you have to keep an eye on the attack and release. You can let more transients through if you slow down the attack. So right when the sound starts playing, the plugin is reacting and if you turn the release up, it's gonna hold those
initial settings for longer. But we gotta answer the question, can this plugin really do
anything that I can't already do with the plugins I currently have? Let's run some tests on an actual mix. I wanna test it out with
this crazy synth sound at the beginning of a drop. So if we add Bloom, we know
it's gonna flatten the tone of the sound, but it's
also gonna bring out the tail of each note. That sounds pretty sick, but
you know what else can do Pretty much the same thing? A multi-band compressor. Let's see if you can tell the difference between the 2 sounds I just played. I can't really tell the difference. The only difference for me was that this multi-band compressor
took a little while longer to set up. With Bloom, I just turned a couple
knobs and I was ready to go. Now let's test it out on vocals. So it's really flattening
out the tone of the vocal, which sounds good on some
areas, but not others. But I can easily adjust that
with these knobs here, like around 6,000, 7,000 hertz. I wanna turn that down so it's pretty quick to dial that in. But again, I can kind of already do what this plugin is doing. So let's add some soothe first. So this is reducing the resonances and flattening the frequency response. And then after that I can add
some multi-band compression. And this is controlling the
dynamics between the attack of the sound and the tail of the sound and just balancing things further. Bloom is actually missing my
favorite control from Soothe, which is this sharpness knob But it seems like Bloom - it just has this default sharpness that you can't really change. Maybe they thought if you could
change the sharpness then it would sound really bad
on the boosts if the resonances were too sharp. I don't know, maybe they're
trying to idiot proof this thing, but it could be nice to see that sharpness control
in the next version. Let's do one final test on the master and then I'll decide if
I'm gonna buy it or not. So I'm dynamically flattening
the tone of the master and I'm able to separate
it between the mids and the sides, which can
help the master sound nice and wide. Again, there are some
multi-band compressors that let you control the
mids and sides separately, but this thing is really easy to set up. It also seems more precise
than your typical multi-band compressor, where one of those
might have like six bands. It seems like Bloom has like 50 bands of multi-band compression going on, and it's able to react to the
level of each of those bands. So if I had to label what this plugin is, I would call it a really
precise multi-band compressor that automatically flattens the tone. So is that worth 209 bucks? Especially when we've seen
that there are other plugins that can kind of replicate
what this does already. That's what had me thinking.
I wasn't initially gonna buy this, but I think I was asking
the wrong questions at the beginning of this video. I should have been asking, how much time can this thing save me? 'cause I think that's
really where the value of this plugin lies for me. This is my full-time
job, so I am gonna buy it 'cause it's gonna save me time. You just have to decide how
much money your time is worth. If music is just a hobby and it's not your career, then you don't really need this thing. It's more of a nice-to-have than a need, but you just have to decide for yourself if 209
bucks is worth it for you to save some time on your mixes. Thanks for watching, peace!
