Advanced Techniques
With the basics covered, here are some techniques that can get better results, although they require a bit of trickery. I’ll start with my favorite.
1. Pre-triggering the de-esser. This is a really cool technique. It’s a major pain in the ass to set up in analog mixing, but it’s easy in digital. Make a copy of your vocal on a separate track. Move the copy ahead of the main vocal by 50 ms. Put a de-esser, or a multi-band compressor (like Waves C6) — something with an external sidechain — on your main vocal. Key it to the copy.
Through this setup, every time an “s” comes through on the copied signal, it will activate the de-esser on the main signal — but it will do it about 50ms earlier than when the actual “s” from the main signal would occur. This allows the de-esser to reach peak gain reduction BEFORE the “s”. If you set the release for about 100 ms, you’ll knock out that “s” sound without leaving any spikes on the leading edge. This is a very transparent way to do this.
2. Over de-essing. Another way to get rid of “s”s is to go overboard with the de-esser, so that it’s working even on parts of the vocal that aren’t sibilant. If you then feed this into an EQ, you can boost your high end back up to regain your lost treble.
The pro of this is that it has the added benefit of making the treble of the vocal very present without making the “s”s jump. The con is that the high end will almost assuredly become less smooth unless you are using a really good de-esser and treble boost. I use this technique on vocals that only become sibilant once I add a lot of high end to them — which is fairly common in pop/hip-hop/dance productions.
3. Smooshing your high end. This one takes a little guts. One of the beautiful properties of minimal phase EQ, is that if you use the exact same EQ and do the exact same amount of boost, followed by the exact same amount of cut, you will nullify your artifacts and come out with the same signal as when you started.
Using this principal, you can add about 10-20 dB of treble gain to your vocals, compress the vocals, and then do the same amount of attenuation after the compressor and get a surprisingly transparent form of de-essing. It sounds weird because it’s so extreme, but you get your normal compressor reacting more to the sibilance. Give it a try, you may be surprised. The major benefit to this is that it works well in the analog realm, not just digital.
Conclusion
There are other techniques for easing out sibilance. These are the ones I’ve found most useful. I should also say that using a combination of these techniques will probably get you further with less artifacts.
Check out the video below to see some de-essing in action:
Matthew Weiss engineers from his private facility in Philadelphia, PA. A list of clients and credits are available at Weiss-Sound.com. He’s also the author of the Mixing Rap Vocals tutorials, available here.
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