Mix engineer Dave Darlington shows how he likes to de-ess vocals using the Waves Sibilance plugin. De-essers take away the harsh S, Sh, and T sounds in a voice that sounds irritating and, well, just plain bad.
We need some of those sounds to be able to understand the lyrics and the content. If you totally remove too much of the audio where sibilance lives (between 4KHz and 8Khz on the frequency scale), that sound bad also. It makes the voice sound like it’s lisping. But we don’t want an overabundance of that frequncy either, because especially at low volumes, those non-musical sounds can poke through a mix and be very distracting. The Sibilance plugin separates the sibilance sounds from the rest of the vocal signal. That makes Sibilance especially surgical when it comes to de-essing vocals.
Dave Darlington shows how to do this in his post at waves.com.
Read more about this here: https://www.waves.com/how-to-de-ess-vocals-sibilance-plugin-tutorial
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