de-essers can either be placed before the main vocal compressor to help attenuate the harshness before compression or placed later in a chain. Sibilance is often made more prominent in a mix when a general levelling compressor has been applied to a vocal track. Some de-essers are ‘smart’, meaning sibilance is detected automatically, others need dialling in manually meaning audio engineers will need to locate the sibilant frequencies by ear. How To Setup A De-Esser Plug-in?ĭe-Esser plug-ins vary slightly in operation though the vast majority follow the same basic principle of attenuating problematic frequencies.
Audio engineers also use DeEsser plug-ins on drum overhead tracks when cymbals sound too ringy in the mix or on mix buses or masters when top-end harshness needs toning down. When Should I Use A De-Esser Plug-in?ĭeEssers are typically used to reduce or remove prominent sibilance in vocal tracks. Unfortunately, sometimes this approach doesn’t yield the best results and purpose build de-essing plug-ins take a far more sophisticated approach. By making the compressor’s detector more sensitive to the particular range in which the “ess” happens, with care, the compressor could be made to pull down the level of the esses without affecting the rest of the vocal too much. In the frequency spectrum sibilance is found upwards of 2kHz - Exact frequency positions being unique to whatever vocal track needs de-esser.ĭe-essers used to be achieved by feeding the external side chain input of a standard hardware compressor with a duplicate version of the audio being processed, in most cases but not always a vocal, with an extreme EQ applied to really accentuate the unpleasant frequencies needing processing. which feature prominent sounding "sss" or "shh" sounds that sound overly or distracting. In this article, we list 9 super clean sounding de-esser plug-ins that you should consider trying the next time you need to process a sibilant vocal track… but first: What Is A De-esser?ĭe-essers attenuate sibilant sounding consonants in recorded vocal tracks.
Every major DAW ships with at least one stock de-esser plug-in, however, there are a number of amazing third-party de-esser alternatives that are well worth checking out if you are plan to either swap out or upgrade your current stock de-esser of choice for something a bit more special… or specialised…
0 kommentar(er)
