Deessing

aaronmcoleman

aaronmcoleman

The truth is out there!
Im trying to de ess without killing the highs.

I've tried a side chained EQ and compressor. Frequency around 5200.

Multiband comp with the band around 5000-6000.

However, it seems there is something else happening in the higher frequencies, around 9200. Is that common or does de easing usually just happen around the 5k range?

Any additional tips?
 
Have you tried volume automation on the sibilance? fiddly but its a good first step.
 
Yeah I've used that but it if I cut more than 5 db it sounds weird but 5db sint enough. That's my usual way of deessing but in this case it isn't working.
 
Well, to answer my own question, what I ended up doing was adding two compressors.

One filtered for just 4700-6000 hz, one filtered for 10000-12000 hz. So basically they just compress in those two ranges when the threshold has been hit and doesn't compress anything most of the time. I set the ratio for 35:1 for the lower part, and 15:1 for the higher. This helped keep the highs and control the ess. It seems like it worked (who knows what I'll think tomorrow when I listen). Does that seem to heavy handed?

Is this basically what a multi-band comp does? I'm using Reaper and just used ReaComp (the basic compressor). I tried this with ReaXComp (the multiband), but had too hard a time.
 
aaronmcoleman said:
Yeah I've used that but it if I cut more than 5 db it sounds weird but 5db sint enough. That's my usual way of deessing....
Click to expand...

Yeah, me too...I'll mess with the envelope by trimming/lowering the tail volume (same as track volume automation, I just do it on slices of the audio)....
...and sometimes I'll use EQ on the SSSSS audio slices....
...and other times I use a combination of both envelope/volume trimming and some EQ.

I boost up the EQ level with a narrow Q and adjust the frequency where it's the most annoying....then just cut the EQ at that point.
 
miroslav said:
Yeah, me too...I'll mess with the envelope by trimming/lowering the tail volume (same as track volume automation, I just do it on slices of the audio)....
...and sometimes I'll use EQ on the SSSSS audio slices....
...and other times I use a combination of both envelope/volume trimming and some EQ.

I boost up the EQ level with a narrow Q and adjust the frequency where it's the most annoying....then just cut the EQ at that point.
Click to expand...

Yeah I don't want to cut the eq the whole time.

I used a combo of around 3-5db automation reduction on the esses, and two compressors with HPF and LPF. now that I have the settings I made presets and I can deess quickly...I'll mess around with it some more to get it even better.
 
of course it ssource specific but try deessing at around 3k instead 5k. This may help and a lot of people go to high when deessing
 
cool thanks. i'll keep that in mind. i usually sweep from around 4k to 6k looking for the ess, but maybe i should start around 3k for some singers.

i actually know a lot about the frequencies of my voice. in real life i do linguistic research and i've done a lot of formant analysis of my vowels and the high energy parts of my sibilants. unfortunately, linguistic research only cares about frequencies below 6k since anything above that isn't really critical for distinguishing different sounds.
 
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