Deprox

Valtteri Tuominen using Deprox on a choral recording project at Finnvox studios.

Automatic EQ and Compression for Vocal Tracks.

Getting EQ and compression right for vocal tracks is hard. It requires keeping track of several faders and knobs simultaneously, including frequency bands, attack and release times, and gain. Hearing all these things at the same time, let alone responding to them, takes years of studio experience and tens of minutes for a single vocal track.

Deprox is a new approach to the old problem of vocal EQ and compression. It offers clean and powerful out-of-the-box settings without the need for major tweaks. As a result, has become a drop-in replacement for the first EQ and compression pass in several studios' workflows.

We built Deprox by recording hundreds hours of what we deemed to be "perfect" takes on a variety of microphones. We then introduced subtle imperfections that professional EQ and compression are supposed to correct. Finally, we trained a machine learning model to locate and suppress these imperfections. The result is automatic EQ and compression that rivals some of the most experienced studio ears.

Deprox is intended to be the first plugin in a vocal chain. It doesn't aim to make some of the more radical EQ and compression decisions necessary for a vocal track to sit within a mix. Rather, it gives the best possible baseline for reaching your ideal mix in a fraction of the time.

We came up with the name Deprox because one thing we've consistently heard is that, amongst other things, it fixes the common problem of singers being too close to a mic. A lot of painstaking EQ and compression goes into fixing just this, and Deprox frees you from that grunt work.

Try before you buy! We have a demo page where you can upload your audio snippets for Deproxing.

Examples

Below, we present a musical example with Deprox bypassed, with normal mids and with the "enhanced mids" setting, which does more significant processing on the first through fifth formants of a vocalist's spectrum (the 100Hz-2000Hz range).

You can compare the three videos below to hear the result. Even with YouTube's compression, the Deprox'd versions shine on the loudest sounds while retaining the intimacy of the original performance. You can also download the 44.1 kHz audio here.

Interface

Deprox has a single settable parameter, Eager Mids, that treats the main vocal formants aggressively, especially during transients. Most folks prefer this, but it's a bit more computationally expensive. When in doubt, set your DAW's audio buffer length to 512-2048 (the default is usually 128).

The visualization shows where in the frequency spectrum Deprox is acting. It's usual range is +6db to -6db, and it is very active in the 2-5kHz range. In spite of this activity, the result always sounds smooth.

Testimonials

Deprox makes a vocal track sound less harsh without losing any presence. For ballads and jazz standards, I almost always prefer its result to the original takes.

— Valtteri Tuominen, Sound Engineer, Finnvox studios

Upgrades

We're constantly training Deprox's models on our CI server, and we record new data all the time in both live sessions and using data augmentation techniques. This allows us to ship new and improved models every month. We're still figuring out our update pricing, but for now updates have been free of charge as none have been that major yet or required more than a few hours work from our part. If you have ideas regarding upgrade pricing, please let us know on our Discord!

Technical Specifications

Mac OS X 10.13 (High Sierra) – macOS 14 (Sonoma)
64-bit VST3, AAX, and AU, Both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs supported.

Deprox adds on average 0.2 seconds of plugin latency to projects.

As Deprox is often the first plugin in an effect chain, users often commit it (ProTools) or bounce it in place (Logic).

Deprox is a mono plugin. If you need a stereo version, our recommendation is to route your signal through mono busses that each apply Deprox and then mix it back to stereo. This allows you to take advantage of different processing threads, which will result in less CPU usage.