Hi Marty,

I've just had another listen. This new mix is absolutely brilliant. You've captured the soul of the song really, really well through the arrangement, your excellent singing, and your very skillful mastering. You should try and get this song in movies!

One small thing that I noticed on my sound system, and I'm passing it on for what it's worth, is that some of the ess sounds seemed a little over processed and were sounding more like "th" than "s".

One thing that I picked up from a seminar that I once went to with Stephen Webber (a grammy award winning producer and professor at Berklee College) was that he manually subtracts the "ess" sound using equalization. Steve's argument was that using a de-esser subtracts brilliance from the whole vocal line and he prefers not to do that.

For a while I used to do what Steve suggested but I discovered in Reaper that volume envelopes with the "sqaure" point shape do the job really well. What I now do in my mixes is to go through and manually adjust all the ess sounds; they're very easy to identify on the graphic display and it usually takes about 15 mins to adjust them. I then sometimes add a little touch of de-esser, although that's rare these days. Below is an image of how I de-ess.



If you're already aware of the above process, please forgive me for boring you!

All the best,
Noel

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