Crackly vox -- compression issue?

[KeithCF]

Hi -- I've been tracking several songs over the last few days. We do 1 track at a time, vox, guitar, bass, then overdubs and harmonies. I use a Focusrite Voicemaster Pro into a Firepod into my laptop and external LaCie hard drive. I have plenty of RAM, a P4 3.0 processor and am not getting any pops and clicks.

On vocal tracks though, I am getting crackling noises from the singer. You know, those mouth movements that give you that smacking lip or tongue- moving-around-in-the-mouth sound. After the vocals run through the effects on the Focusrite, the mouth sounds come out "enhanced", like crackly popping clicks. I am not using aggressive compression, I'm using the de-essing feature, and overall I am getting a decent tone in the vocals. We also use a slip-on windscreen on the mic.

Is there anything I can do to eliminate some of these mouth sound artifacts? If you are doing several vocal overdubs, the sounds start to add up. They might not get heard by a casual listener, but they are definitely there.

Any advice is appreciated!

Thanks --

Keith

 

[Fletcher]

Go into the computer and eliminate them on some tracks and turn them down on the main track. If you're using compression then you're bringing these sounds to the foreground.

The nature of compression is to make soft things louder and loud things softer... which will often bring up little noises like this. If you remove them all together the vocal will usually have a pretty unnatural quality which is why you just want to turn down those sounds on the main track.

Best of luck with it.