De Essing

[brianhood]

This always bother's me. I can never seem to find a good threshold setting that makes me happy. It either rapes the vocals of all life, or it sounds like Jeffree Star is trying to sing the song(lots of esssss'sss)

Do any of you guys do anything special for de essing. I usually compress vocals a ton, so the ess's really come out. I usually use one of the waves de essers, but it never seems to make me happy, as there end up being supper annoying high frequencies that dont get knocked out.

 

[xMannequiNx]

if you de ess before compression you wont have to worry about compression messing with the esses

factory preset "male de-ess" on the pro tools de-esser always works for me

 

[brianhood]

if you de ess before compression you wont have to worry about compression messing with the esses

factory preset "male de-ess" on the pro tools de-esser always works for me

in my experience, de essing before compression is way worse. Not sure if that's just me or what
maybe i've been doing it wrong

 

[Fragle]

yep, the de-esser should be the FIRST in the vocal chain.

keep in mind that a de-esser only reduces the sss like sounds of the vocal, NOT overall brightness. if you find that there's too much stuff going on in the high freq range, just use a mild high shelf, or even better, back off the high boost people usually apply to their vocals ^^

i'd say go and post your vocal chain here, maybe there's something wrong with the other processing.

personally i'm using spitfish, and it's been great to me. there's a listen function where you can precisely listen to the parts of the sound that are getting tamed, great for finetuning. i try to stay on the lower side with de-essing though....it's easy to go overboard and give the singer a lisp.

 

[gabriel g.]

Re-DeEsser works great for me in combination with Re-Vox.

You can also build your own deesser with a compressor sidechained to the problem frequencies.
A guy called Lagerfeld (on gearslutz) posted an amazing set up for the logic compressor...

 

[ahjteam]

This always bother's me. I can never seem to find a good threshold setting that makes me happy. It either rapes the vocals of all life, or it sounds like Jeffree Star is trying to sing the song(lots of esssss'sss)

Do any of you guys do anything special for de essing. I usually compress vocals a ton, so the ess's really come out. I usually use one of the waves de essers, but it never seems to make me happy, as there end up being supper annoying high frequencies that dont get knocked out.

I usually try to fix these things in the tracking process with popfilter and good mic selection. And s'sses aren't a bad thing, because if you remove them too much, it takes the edge off the vocals. But if they are really hard, it might be a bad mic choise or you are just pumping too hard against the compressor.

I usually only use de-esser on reverbs, because it usually makes them go bananas. If I do have to use de-esser on the main vocal track, I usually use it to complete the stuff that eq does. So first you put the eq to say 6500khz and then you cut -4dB there and if it still sounds fucking awful, put the de-esser to the same spot to cut ~6dB

The signal chains should be:

Main:
Autotune
EQ
De-esser
Compressor

Send:
EQ
De-esser
Reverb
EQ

 

[Machinated]

The signal chains should be:

Main:
Autotune
EQ
De-esser
Compressor

Send:
EQ
De-esser
Reverb
EQ

Autotuning should be printed to tracks rather than leaving it as an insert. automode=uke:

 

[AudioGeekZine]

Try automating the vocal track down on the esses. You should be able to see where they are easily.

Check out the Massey De-Esser it's very good.