- in Gear , New Music Gear Monday , Plugin , Production , Software by Bobby Owsinski
New Music Gear Monday: Klevgrand Brusfri Noise Reducer Plugin
We’ve all had those situations where we’ve had to record a noisy electric guitar or keyboard, or just found the background noise on a track too much to handle. Sure, sometimes the noise gets covered in the mix, but it’s also cumulative, so 4 or 5 noisy tracks can really muddy up a mix. There are plenty of very good noise reducer plugins on the market, but most of them are somewhat sophisticated and pricy, but that’s not the case with Klevgrand Brusfri, a dead simple noise reducer at a reasonable price.
First of all, Klevgrand is a Swedish company, and Brusfri means “noise free” in Swedish. The trick here is that instead of manipulating phase to clean up noise like many other similar plugins (which can add some unwanted audible side-effects), Brusfri uses several finely-tuned expander/gates to build an intelligent noise suppressor.
Using it is about as simple as you can get. Select and hold the LEARN button for a second while listening to the unwanted noise, and this creates a noise profile. The trick here is that you only want to play the background noise without the true recorded element. Most of the time that’s all that’s needed, but Brusfri also provides a number of parameters to fine-tune the reduction, like Attack, Threshold, Release and Lookahead. There are also controls that affect the tonality of the noise, which include Edge (affects the expander ratios), a high-pass filter, High (boosts the high frequencies), and Mix to set the balance between the processed and unprocessed signal.
Klevgrand Brusfri is available in AU, VST and AAX formats, and the price is only $59.99. An iOS version is also available for $14.99.
To see what it can do, check out the video below, or visit the Brusfri page on the Klevgrand website.
Thanks to Dave Smith and Wade Cottingham for bringing this to my attention on the Hit Makers Club Facebook group.
