In this article, Graham Kirkman looks at oeksound’s spiff for banishing clicks and lip smacks from dialogs and VO’s in Audio Post-Production and sound design of pulsating, palpitating, staggery FX.

oeksound’s spiff - what is it and what does it do? Well oeksound say:

“spiff is our take on transient control. It has been designed to cut or boost transients with extreme detail. Similar to Soothe2, spiff analyses the incoming signal and applies the processing only on the parts of the signal that contain the transient information. This keeps the rest of the signal intact and free from side effects.”

spiff is perfect for use in a music production workflow. But what about those of us that work in post and don’t make music? Is it of any use to us? Let’s start with dialogs (and - importantly poorly recorded ones, which is the vast majority of what I work on) Here I find myself using spiff to transparently attenuate of unwanted ‘clicks’ and help treat ‘plosives’ (But oeksound say it better than me:)

”These clicks could be a byproduct of excessive compression, treble boost, bad microphone choice, or just an unwanted part of the performance. spiff has been carefully tweaked to work well on vocal tracks”

oeksound's spiff - Dials

I don’t find myself using it for much else with dialog tracks, so let’s move onto sound design.

You may be thinking to yourself “sound design...what?” but because it can be pushed to its limit and yet produce very few artefacts, you can insert it on an audio file and end up with a very different - and useable result from what you started with.

I’m not sure that oeksound envisioned spiff being used in this way when they were making it, but if you’re after a specific audio result in your sound design then spiff can be one of the first plug-ins to reach for. The audio result I’m talking about is one that is ‘pulsating’, ‘palpitating’, ‘staggery’, ‘wavering’, ‘convulsive’. (That’s the best description I can come up with!!).

oeksound's spiff Sound Design - Earthquake

oeksound's spiff Sound Design - Explosion

oeksound's spiff Sound Design - Waterfall

 oeksound's spiff Sound Design - Percussive Tail

As spiff works on transients, it’s probably best to start with a sound that has obvious transients (you don’t have to of course but I find that spiff has the best results with this type of sound).

From this point you can choose to either cut OR boost the transients (resulting in very different effects) You can then choose the amount of effect with a combination of the depth control and sensitivity (higher values detect more transients).

Sharpness is basically the Q of all the cuts (or boosts) The decay setting makes the sound more ‘reverby’ at higher values and more staccato at lower ones - as well as this the decay lf/hf changes the relative difference in decay time between low and high frequencies.

Lower means that low frequencies end up with more decay than the higher ones, and vice-versa. You can start to imagine the possibilities for sound design with all these changes to the sound that Spiff can do.

Just like oeksound’s soothe2, spiff has a band listen function (which can be set in the preferences to activate when you grab one of the 5 frequency band nodes.) When you grab one, spiff then monitors the delta signal on the frequency area that the selected band affects. By sweeping over the frequency spectrum you can quickly find the part of the signal you want processed. The Delta mode can be latched on and used as your final output. A technique that I use more often than not as it produces a more unusual sound that with it turned off, and unusual more often than not what I’m looking for in sound design.

Conclusion

Summing up I’d say that spiff is amazing for banishing clicks and lip smacks from dialogs and VO’s but is also useful for sound design, especially if what you’re looking for is that pulsating’, ‘palpitating’, ‘staggery’, type of FX.

spiff is priced at £139 (UK) and you can get a 20 day trial licence. To find out more head over to oeksound’s website.