Alternate techniques for De-Essing

[louieshowers]

Originally Posted by Guy McDude

agreed.
Also a great fix for finger/ fretting noise on acoustic tracks.

+1

clip gain is the best feature of PT10 hands down.

[Kenny Gioia]

Originally Posted by janmuths

Instead of de-esser plug ins, I now use clip gain. Takes a moment, but sounds superior to all plug ins I've ever used (at least to my ears).

Yeah. I posted this before we had Clip Gain.

Clip Gain is superior because it's pre-fader or plugins so any compressors on the channel are never seeing the loud ess sounds as they're lowered before they get there.

I didn't even know this was a sticky.

[DonaldM]

Another de-esser trick...just have your vocalist sing in Hawaiian...there's no "s" sounds in Hawaiian...so you won't have to deal with it at all!

[koerschgen]

Try the Deesser from Eiosis! Thats a superb deesser, it "cuts" th esses out... Try it!

K

[folkdude]

Wow! Thanks! You just saved me like hours... I have 15 songs I'm de-essing, and I had already cut the regions up and was about to start volume automating and then I saw this. Big time saver. Just put trim on bypassed, turn bypass off for the esses, boom. Don't even have to specify volume, just leave it set at 3db or so, all your esses are good to go!

[Zakazastar]

Originally Posted by DonaldM

Another de-esser trick...just have your vocalist sing in Hawaiian...there's no "s" sounds in Hawaiian...so you won't have to deal with it at all!

But seriously... If you have more than 2 backing vocals - let one of them sing with "s", and others just have to skip "s-z" altogether. Then you have to deal just with the main one :)

I tried this with group of 5 backing vocals sitting one on another - worked perfectly!

[zsarbomba]

duc tape the singers tooth gap's. Or get them to chew chewy sticky fudge to fill the gaps before singing.

[Anibal]

FabFilter de-esser or just split the waveform and lower the esses

[Muddy-T]

If you got the time clip-gain is definitely the way to go.

Any D-esser plug in will do the job quick & dirty; Waves is good, Massey is great, even the on-board good ol' Digidesign plug is quite good.

I've been using Brainworx's Dynamic EQ with very good results.

Frequency specific (multiband) compressors are also worth experimenting with, these could be anything from the CLA-2A (with some tweaking of the Hi-Freq control) to something very sophisticated like the Waves C4.

If everything else fails; strap a pencil across your LDC with a rubber band...

[CygnusX-1Bk2]

Mic placement.