[DrFord]

Its a combination of all above said.

Go purchase a metal pop filter. Guitar center makes one that is cheap and they sound WAAAAY better than the nylon pop screens, they don't hold germs, are easily cleaned, and look cooler.

Next, go to Massey and download the demo version of his de-esser, then purchase it because you will love it.

It's really that simple. Sibilance is the problem you have, and it plagues every engineer recording vocals. The S, F & TH sounds tend to live in singers anywhere between 4500hz - 9khz and really vary on the singer. Girls tend to produce lower frequency sibilence than men, men tend to center around 7-8khz.

What you want to do is active the plug in, and then active the key listen feature, and sweep the frequency range until you find the trouble spot. I highlight a sound that is specifically the culprit, loop the audio, and then isolate the frequency.

Here's the thing, using a de-esser across an entire vocal can smear the consonents of the vocal, and make it sound bad. A trick I learned from the DUC a few years back, was to create a duplicate vocal audio track, and then manually go in and delete everything except the problem sounds. Then make the output of this track to a bus, and route that bus into the key input of the de-esser, so that the de-esser only activate on the problem sounds, and not across the entire vocal.

If this is too much to worry about, I often find it is faster and more efficient to just go in manually and audiosuite gain, and gain down the problem sounds by hand. Sometimes this really is faster and sounds better.

This can REALLY become a problem when you have several vocals stacked hissing together....

HTH's
GL!