Alternate techniques for De-Essing

[simon.a.billington]

As always I try to work the simplest and most efficient way. Well that's the ideal and I can be a fair way off that track sometimes.

So I'll try the "quick" solutions first, move on, ideally, and come back to it again if it needs further attention. If it's simply the case if the rogue ess that the deesser isn't capturing, then I might take care of those by hand.

It it requires more work I might try a multiband like C6, they have some good presets that set you up immediately for the task and it's a matter of adjusting. I could do this in addition to the previous deesser or instead and anything that still goes through I might adjust by hand.

If you are in the habit of managing the peaks on your vocals it might pay to soft limit/clip before the deesser. What this does is enable you to set up the threshold more reliably since the peaks are less dynamic, but won't be as effective if you are in the habit of crushing those peaks.

Meanwhile general compression I would want to put after deessing.

[Adel Ale Agha]

I usually use a compressor sidechained by a narrow band pass eq around 5 kHz frequency and I'm quite satisfied.

[simon.a.billington]

RX 6 has a new Deesser. This should be interesting.

[lesbrunn]

Sometimes esses in any given piece will vary in amplitude and frequency, and using any one method may not be the best approach. I use a combination of clip gain and the Eiosis de-esser. Too much de-essing can give you lispy esses, so I'll generally use just enough to handle most of the esses naturally, and manually attenuate the most stubborn ones. Automating de-essers also works well.