Can anyone give me some tips on the De-Ess plug? I have tried it on small parts of the vocal, and it seems to deaden it compared to the rest of the track. Do I process the whole track, and then maybe EQ at bit to bring back some brightness? Or does that bring back the ssssss.

I am using the PGplug De-Ess with the 3 settings: freq, threshold, release. What is a good starting point with these? I also have Ozone4. Does anyone think it would do a better job?

thanks
martin

Try a wind screen on your mic. Or use a coat hanger and a pair of panty hose as a wind screen. Stretch the panty hose over the coat hanger and sing through it.

I'm using a wind screen. It stops my pops, but not my ssssssssss.

In an Audio Editing program such as Audacity, you can trim a bit of it out, and/or reduce the volume.

I've seen an Audio engineer copy a good "s" from a performance, and paste it in overtop of the bad ones, I think they were using Protools for that, not sure.

One that a lot of people like is Spitfish. Its from digitalfishphones and comes in a free bundle.
The compressor in that bundle is nice too (for vocals even).

http://www.digitalfishphones.com/main.php?item=2&subItem=5

On Spitfish
Tune lets you narrow in on the freq
Sensitivity lets you adjust how much it grabs (kinda like threshold)
Depth lets you adjust how much it cuts what it does grab

It may be worth checking these plugins out. Blockfish and Spitfish are in the plugin list here.

I think in PG version it is
frequency adjustment,
the 'threshold' is how loud it has to get before it kicks in
the release is how soft it dies down to before the de-esser relaxes and stops clamping it down

That 'ratio' (or depth) adjustment is the difference

I *think* there is a section in the manual that explains the DX plugins.

Ozone4 does not work well in the track FX slots, it is known to have issues on various softwares as it is not designed to run there. Same with some other mastering software I have. There is no de-esser in Ozone4 anyway.

Quote:

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I'm using a wind screen. It stops my pops, but not my ssssssssss.

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If your complaint is a constant hiss noise, that is NOT what a De-esser is meant to do at all.

The De-esser is designed to help iron out the sibilants of the human voice, that can hang over and be distracting in a recording. Words that end in "S" and the like.

It will not remove hiss noise, which is another problem entirely.


--Mac