This Week In Music Production - Plugin Spotlight: Clear

This week in music production, we are taking a look at one of my new favorite VST plugins: Clear by Supertone. (This is NOT sponsored. I simply really like this plugin.)

This week’s entry will be a little brief due to overseas travel (hello Winnipeg!).

Recently, I undertook a project for a group that wished to create a cover song. There was an existing instrumental and all the vocals and translyrics were already sorted. My job was to mix and master it all. This was the first time I had undertaken such a large vocal project given my EDM background and there were a number of challenges during the mixing process I had to learn to overcome. The most notable one, however, was varying vocal clarity.

There was a fairly significant range of quality in the vocal recordings (as this was a hobby project by the group). Some sounded fantastic while others were recorded in less-than-ideal environments. Lots of echo, background hiss and hum, the works.

I tried a whole host of different techniques to try and squeeze what I could. Changing volume gates to hide the noise, overprocessing with lots of EQing, adding different FX chains like RC-20 Color to try and hide the imperfections by adding different character, and many other things. None of the results were to my satisfaction.

This frustration led me down a rabbit-hole of looking for something that could “de-reverb” or “de-echo” vocals. Turns out there is exactly a plugin for this purpose by Supertone. Their plugin, “Clear”, is incredibly simple and very powerful.

“Clear” by Supertone

It only has 3 main controls. 1 knob each for controlling the intensity of audio ambience, vocals, and reverb.

It’s fantastic.

It instantly transformed my most problematic vocal into something you could easily pass for having been recorded in an amateur studio setup. The reverb and background noise vanished. All that remained was a super clean and crisp isolated vocal. Borderline magic.

At the time of writing, Supertone doesn’t exactly go into a whole lot of detail about how this plugin works on their website. I wish I could dive deeper into its mechanics as it truly works wonders. I imagine however it uses a machine learning algorithm of sorts to accomplish this.

I won’t provide the problematic vocal as an example so as not to single-out someone who was otherwise a fantastic singer. Instead I have recorded a brief demo:

Note that this won’t improve the actual quality of the voice itself. If there’s a bad vocal in a bad environment, you’re going to get a bad vocal. If what you’re trying to isolate already sounds of fairly decent quality you will see the best results.

Check out Clear by Supertone here.