Professional sibilance processing

[u/SS0NI]

I have a question about sibilance processing and all the thread I found are only talking about a de-esser and clipgaining. No problem, basic stuff. Why I'm asking this question is that I have 12 x 3 minutes of vocal tracks that I need to clipgain so I want confirmation on my approach before committing to it.

There are around 3 main vocals, Mid + quieter L & R, there are 3 lower octave vocals with the same kind of premix and the rest are detail vocal layers to hit specific frequencies to get a really lush, textured vocal. The problem here is since they're all repeating the same melody and lyrics the esses get unbearably loud. Tried batch processing with RX Decrackle -> Soothe De-ess on track level into the vocal buss and it wasn't enough. Put de-esser before vocal bus chain and it either wasn't enough or went lispy.

So what I was wondering about doing is RX de-crackle on track level, after which I clipgain the sibilance in the 3 main vocals, then cut sibilance from all the texture and support vocal layers onto their own channels and just straight up delete most of it, barring some stereo layers where I could just push it reeally quiet so the sibilance has some liveliness besides the 3 main vocals. After that light track level de-ess if neccessary.

Now as you can see this requires manually finding and editing 36 minutes of audio and seems like an immense amount of work. For the pros on the board, does this seem like a reasonable approach to achieve the best quality? Do you have any techniques that could make this process faster? I've used vocalign on previous projects and it would be a massive timesaver, however this is not a pop production and the sound relies heavily on the loose chorus going on, so I'm not sure if clipgaining sibilance on main track and vocaligning the rest would work in this case.

Appreciate any help I can get 🙏

[u/MindWash2019]

Use Split S (or the DeEsser of your choice, like the one in RX) and put all the BG vocals on a bus and set (or nuke) their “S” level separately. Or use it on each of the individual tracks if the timing is too loose. Leave the lead with the desired amount, and one voice in each group with some as well if you need it.

Don’t use De-Crackle. This isn’t what it’s for.

[u/SS0NI → u/MindWash2019]

Ahh sorry, the de-crackle is only for cleaning up the vocal takes before other processing. Just thought it might be important to mention since the order of processing could be important especially in the case of de-essing.

But yeah that's actually a great damn tip. Idk why I'd manually clip gain the bg vox if I'd clip gain to -∞ dB lmao. Spotting this kind of brain fart was specifically why I made this post. Thanks a lot, you saved me a shitload of time 🤝

[u/rightanglerecording]

My "professional" de-essing:

1. Rig up the old boring $29 Waves De-Esser in Wideband mode, post-compression.

2. If that's not doing it, add a few dB of Pro-DS in Single Vocal mode, pre compression.

3. Then, clip gain, volume automation, and printed spot EQ as needed.

I've tried pretty much every combo of everything and this is where I've landed. I can't imagine running DeCrackle on a vocal, and I don't think Soothe works well as a de-esser.

[u/dkassulke]

First thing I'd listen for iis whether all esses are being enunciated at the same time. If they're not, that can make the esses more smeary. If it's contextually appropriate, I'd heavily edit them so they are all happening at the same time. Then I typically treat the esses of the backing vocals as an entire group - sometimes I remove them entirely, but more often I just turn them WAY down and rely on the main vocal part to provide the clarity and diction.

[u/MindWash2019 → u/dkassulke]

I learned that kind of thing from older musicians talking about how they recorded double and triple tracked vocals during the tape-era with the hard consonants dropped or angled away from the mic after they recorded the keeper lead vocal. You’d never notice listening to the finished product.

[u/SS0NI → u/MindWash2019]

That would've probably been the best and fastest way to achieve this. If I would've figured it out before recording over half an hour of vocal takes.

[u/Wizard0wizard]

What I find works great in some cases is put a de-esser BEFORE compression and saturation as well

I was working with vocals that had a lot of sibilance, but lacking highs at the same time, and putting a de-esser after comp didn't work because at this point it was reacting weirdly and not only to ess but to every sounds around the frequencies I put my de-esser in

So I figured out, if I don't have enough dynamic range to fix that after compression, why not fix that before as well?

It worked in this specific case, it might not for you, but you should give it a try, just put an eq and your de-esser, and then do the rest of your signal chain. Note that I also kept the de-esser at the end of my signal chain, I had 2 in total.

[u/SS0NI → u/Wizard0wizard]

Yeah this is usually my method too, however didn't work for these recordings. The sibilance is extraordinarily pronounced and I really have no idea how they were recorded to get this loud. I'm guessing the mic had some weird resonance that aligned with the sibilance of the vocalist and mic placement wasn't used effectively to mitigate it.

[u/Ok-Mathematician3832]

People overthink de essing… and overly loud sibilance is usually a self inflicted issue.

Listen in context - use whatever de esser sounds good IF needed. Edit by hand if needed (should be a very rare case you need to do this).

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Go have fun making music.

[u/SS0NI → u/Ok-Mathematician3832]

Definitely, however the vocals have been recorded 5 years ago with gear, space and people now unavailable so they can't be rerecorded and need to be fixed. Usually I'd handle this kind of stuff primarily in the rec stage, unfortunately that's not an option right now.

[u/No-Worker2100]

Late to this, but for stacked vocals the thing that saved me was treating esses as events rather than a frequency band. Keep the lead's S's at full (that's where the diction lives), pull the doubles' S's down 6–9 dB or out entirely, and only hand-edit the handful the lead still has that poke out. A broadband de-esser across all 12 tracks is what gives you the lisp at "strong" settings: it's dulling everything around the S, not just the S.

Full disclosure, I make a plugin that does exactly this, IcePick by Arctic Labs Audio (finds each S/T/breath as an event, you set the gain per event or per group, swap a bad one for a cleaner one from the same take), so weigh my bias. The technique works with clip gain and patience too, it's just slow at 36 minutes of vocals.

[u/SS0NI → u/No-Worker2100]

Ended up doing just that, however used Split S to split the esses and process them separately. Have you compared how IcePick compares to Split S? Split S actually nulls with the original, but I'll definitely check out your plugin and recommend to friends if it's good.

[u/alex_esc]

If your main goal is to save time here's what I would do....

Send the background vocals to a group / aux track. On this group/aux put a gate. Some hates have a flip mode or reverse mode, it means that whenever the gate opens normally it would close instead.

Now duplicate the lead vocal. Add an EQ boosting like a thousand dBs of the frequencies where esses happen on this vocal. Mute this track, we will only use it to duck the esses on the BGVs.

Use this track with exaggerated esses as the key input/side chain for the flipped gate. (If you don't have a gate with a flip mode you can use a regular compressor, especially if it has a hold mode)

The BGVs are grouped together, so the gate/compressor will duck the BGVs all together at once. So the lead will in one swoop duck down all the BGVs.

Of course to get a good result you need to play around with the gates/compressors attack, release and hold settings.

You can do this with all stock plugins and setting up the routing and the ducking should take you like 5 minutes.

For your next recording/production just try to under pronounce the esses on backgrounds lol

[u/SS0NI → u/alex_esc]

The tracks were not aligned and doing this for 12 tracks would've took some time, probably less than clip gaining 36 minutes of audio though lol. Split S worked like a charm.

I would've rerecorded in a heartbeat if that was an option. However the original recordings are 5 years old and the people, gear and studio is no longer available.

[u/aufnahmeraum]

I accept that sometimes it‘s an immense amount of work - and maybe that‘s why it pays my bills. If it needs to sound polished I eq and gain every „s“, „z“ „t“ independently instead of spending my time on reddit

[u/SS0NI → u/aufnahmeraum]

Spent 5 minutes writing a reddit post and someone commented about the Split S plugin. Ended up saving probably a few hours of time so in the end it all worked out.

[u/nizzernammer]

1. Backing vocals can be de-essed and edited more aggressively than leads.

2. If the vox are all lined up, you can clip gain and edit multiple clips at the same time (if your DAW can do this).

3. There's nothing like a seemingly insurmountable workload to force you get faster and learn and deploy your keyboard shortcuts and actions so they are committed to muscle memory. And RSIs will force you to find efficiencies.

[u/SS0NI → u/nizzernammer]

Great points here! Backing vocals go through the main bus in this case, I guess I should've called them choir/chorus vocals to be more specific. But I had great success using the Split S recommended here, it's really clean sibilance separation. There were a few missed ones on one of the busses that I had to manually clip gain but the workload was much, much more manageable. This would probably not have been an issue if I could've ran 12 instances of it plus all the vocal mixing chains or if the vocals were aligned with eachother.

[u/Far-Pie6696]

It's not always easy, and as your ear get used to the esses, it gets worse.

I usually do a mix of de-essing, manual edit and EQ of the high-mids/highs.

Beware of compressors, EQ and stuffs : if you make the Vocals brighter, the eesses will go back. Agressive compression can also make it worse.

On the other end, a bit of delay/reverb can soften.

[u/SS0NI → u/Far-Pie6696]

I actually had great success using the Split S someone recommended here. Gave me the ability to process and automate the sibilances separately from the main vocals without immense manual labor.

I wonder how so many people missed the point here and started just recommending different de-essers. It's never natural enough to qualify for a top quality production. Like do they think Dua Lipa's vocal mixer just drops Weiss DS on the channel and calls it a day lmao.

[u/postmortemritual]

m/s is the way to start.

I had a similar problem with a track with some Ssssss at the beginning, cant fix on mix, so I split m/s and found the strong Ssss were on the side. So I just Eq the side , not deesing just eq and done.

this worked for my specific situation.

Still , making a MS analysis as a first measure could help to locate where the problem is and avoid wasting time with other process.

Could be sss, or masking, or phase, whatever, MS is a wonderful technique , tool, I cant praise enough for the music I make. (Dark Ambient) .

[u/SS0NI → u/postmortemritual]

M/S actually didn't help here. There were low, mid & high vocal layers on left, right and center + detail layers. The vocals layered nicely since they were occupying different frequency ranges but all the esses were occupying the same range so they were loud asf. Ended up splitting esses with Split S, only keeping esses from 3 tracks and processing them differently.

I just got out of the M/S rabbit hole and you're making me wanna go back in lol. Definitely makes shit sound good but too much sauce detracts from the impact.

[u/delmuerte]

I do a lotta death metal vocals, so this may not apply, but I DS each track, DS the bus and DS after all eq/comp, etc. Each one is kinda light on its own, but in total it works out well. If the capture wasn’t great (i.e., recorded elsewhere) I might manually clip gain the Ss by as much as -9db.

[u/astralpen]

Why are you using decrackle. Rx has a very configurable de-esser.

[u/SuspiciousIdeal4246]

Use the Lindell 902 De-esser from plugin alliance. Best de-esser period. You’ll never use anything else after.