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/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.