De-Essing

I am about to place a $100 bill in your pocket.

Well, that is, if you are doing any recording anytime soon. I tried something exciting today and I thought I'd pass it on.

If you've ever done any mixing, regardless of whether it's in a gazillion dollar studio or on a pawn shop 4-track recorder, you've most likely had to deal with sibilance issues at some point. Sibilance is that "ess" sound that is made with, well, "ess" sounds. Normally, it's not an issue in regular conversation or simple recording. However, once a little EQ and compression is applied to a mix buss, or even just to the vocal track itself, you can bet that sibilance will rear it's head.

I fought the sibilance issue on the MG4 EP on "Another Day in Paradise." What an obvious song to have sibilance issues on. The "Par-a-diSSSSe" was a real doozy. Brent Lambert (a great mastering engineer in Carrboro, NC who everyone should use) tried to fix it in mastering by pulling some upper high frequencies. It killed some of the cymbal brilliance, so we split the difference. He turned to me and said, "Next time, just pull the Ess's down about -6dB when you are mixing."

I hadn't had much of a sibilance issue since the EP recording until this week. I have been setting some Psalms to music this summer. One of them, Psalm 89 reads "Forever I will sing the good ness of the Lord." "Sing" and "--ness" were hard to reign in, especially with 9 to 10 vocal layers. So, I tried the trick that Brent mentioned.

I can't tell you how good of a De-Esser the simple 6-dB method is. If you use a digital format like Pro Tools or Cubase, it's very easy to just program the automation volume over the wave form. You'll want to judge it on a case by case basis. Sometimes 6 is too much. Sometimes, not enough. If you're at home on a simple 4 track, I'd go conservatively in your manual mixdown. Just pull a little when the esses are coming. If you are in a mega-studio, chances are you probably wont' be reading this. But, you never know. I get the darnedest emails these days.

Oh, and that $100 I was talking about...well, that's the price you won't be paying for a mastering engineer to go in and pull your esses. Just do it before you master. If you aren't going to master, just pull it in the mix. This is one of those "ounce of prevention" issues that is really worth every second on the front end.

Happy recording.