Sonic Stories: Vlada Sova

Get the insights and techniques that Vlada Sova uses for her recordings. We sit down and dive into everything from plugins to processing sound in this Sonic Stories article.

What are your go-to audio plugins when you’re cleaning up sounds and what makes them essential to your workflow?

iZotope RX Advanced is my best friend - I use it for both technical and creative tasks. I also rely a lot on DAW shortcuts like Strip Silence and Space Clips to speed up the technical process as much as possible, so I have more time left for the creative part.

Is there one plugin you’ve discovered that completely changed the way you edit or process sound effects?

The real game-changer for me wasn't a specific plugin - it was truly understanding how each type of processing actually works. Most of my tasks are done with free plugins, like the sets from Kilohearts or Melda Production.

How much processing do you typically apply to your recordings before you consider them finished and ready to use?

I'm not a fan of over-processing audio at all. I'm more of an audio-layering person - I believe that by picking and combining the right audio elements, you can reach the result you want faster and with better quality. It's like a good recipe, where every ingredient is in the right amount. You know :)

What’s a sound you’ve chased for a long time but still haven’t managed to capture exactly the way you want?

I want to record the sounds of different wild animals and birds, but catching the right moment - without any people around - is a challenge with a huge asterisk on it.

How do you approach organising and documenting a recording session so the sounds are easy to find and use months or even years later?

I organize all my recordings into folders by year -> month -> theme, and I give each file a simple but clear name so I don't forget months or years later what exactly I recorded there. That's for raw recordings. When recordings go into a sound library, that's a separate kind of organization, and there I use the UCS naming system.

Have you ever recorded something that sounded disappointing on location but became surprisingly useful once you heard it back in the studio?

Probably some of my pyrotechnics recordings - that might be the hardest and most dynamic recording session of my life. It's not easy to predict volume levels, so some of the recordings that clipped during the session, and I was sure "well, that's it, this won't work," turned out to be pretty usable in the end (thanks to 32-bit float recording).