De-Esser Plugins are NOT SEXY!
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- Опубліковано 14 тра 2020
- De-Essers are convenient, but the pro's know there's a better way to produce a smoother vocal sound that sits better in a mix. Follow Gregory Scott, who owns Kush Audio and designs their analog hardware and plugins with one goal: maximum sonic vibe. He's also a musician and audio engineer, all of which gives him a very distinct take on music and mixing.
Check out www.thehouseofkush.com and slap some sweet Kush flavor on your productions now, because the world has enough boring mixes!
My problem with de-essing is that the more I listen to the esses, the more that all esses seem too much to me, and at that point I can't trust my ears any longer >.
That's not just a de-ess problem, that's a "been micro-focusing on one thing for too long" problem. Don't fix it all at one time. Move onto something else for a while, listen to a reference, take a break and step outside and reset the brain... come back, do a bit-more de-essing, switch gears again when you know you've lost perspective.
@@TheHouseofKushTV You are precious! Thank you for all of the information! You've helped me so much!
Take your time with it and also take breaks if you need. The cleaner your sibilance the better your mix will become going forward.
Just @ me next time, FFS! Haha.
What he said
"No honey, it's not porn. This is work related. " She is not convinced, but wants to watch more kush videos. Just to be sure.
LoL
😂
this comment wins
hahaha!
Dude you’re the most well-spoken guy doing these types of tutorials. No hemming and hawing, and sans the self-trumpeting and just plain...noise that a lot of other people communicate with. Well done.
Like a good radio station, but actually informative and minus the ads and other bullshit😄
You and Dan Worrall.
Yeah, not a push towards a website, no "hit like and subscribe now and the bell for the notifications, it would really help me out!" nonsense. Just liked and subscribed because of that. And the great content. :)
Yeah out the gate I hit subscribe. He flows his words good and you can tell he knows 100% what he's talking bout. Reliable information!
My favorite bit about these videos, other than their ASMR-yness and educational content, is that staring at a DAW screen is at an absolute minimum and intentional thus forcing you to listen and pay attention!
Thanks for noticing! I learned on analog consoles and tape, I absolutely LOVE the daw and all that it makes possible but I find the visuals incredibly distracting when doing critical mix tasks.
@@TheHouseofKushTV and i can’t thank you enough for not filling the screen with it and distracting from the actual content! Thanks a ton!
@@TheHouseofKushTV Me too! Which is why you are now my favorite UA-cam mentor. Do you give lessons!?
Your intro fills me with excitement and you are so clear and keeps it to the topic. Im hooked and subscribed
Damn... I wanted to sleep but here I am, learning lots...
Excellent advice. Dave Pensado taught me this years ago and I was taken aback at how obvious and simple it is. Time consuming, but the best approach overall. I use ProTools audio gain on the audio region, usually about 6db lower. Thanks UBK!
Crazy how all the videos I've watched so far are precisely related to what I am currently struggling with. Really appreciate the way these complicated topics are addressed. I hate when pro mixers spend an hour going step-by-step with how they mixed a particular song on a DAW I do not have. There are only a couple channels that I've found like this one. Thanks for taking the time to properly address the common problems with mixing. I've used a couple of your methods so far, and my mixes are already improving. Thank you.
Thanks! These struggles are, I think, universal for people who aren't directly mentored by a master. I figure if it was a major pain in my butt, others are likely suffering from the same woes!
I fully appreciate your energy and approach on topics you discuss
Love it, very helpful as always!
On a side note, your plug-ins cured my "digititus" and I've been a fan ever since.
Another amazing video. Looks like I'm watching them all tomorrow and making notes. Love your delivery and content, thanks so much 👍
God bless brother. Thank you for these tips and wisdom. Definitely going to take my mixing up a notch, I would always love to get those bright vocals for the presence, but I always struggled with taming the high mids and highs... To be honest though, when you said the part about moving the automation forward a notch to keep the transient(s) then automate after that part... WOW! You are the fkn man!!!
man i watched a couple of your vids and got straight to work, you really giving out all the gems in a fun way i appreciate this keep em coming i subbed and hit the bell!!
REAPER has spectral editing which allows you to take this a step further and reduce the gain of specific frequencies in each word and syllable
The most recent Melodyne is a great tool for this now.
Yo man just got into mixing and your videos are the shit. Got a mixing board after listening to the basic frequency video. Changed everything drastically.
oh man you're saving my life !! I'm working on my next song and I want my vocals to be seeeeeexy. And my de essers were killing it. I tried to automate too but I rewatch your video and the shape at -6db as a starting point to move around to see what it does... Powerful tip !! Love you ubk !!!
Thumbs up for these tips. After 20 years of mixing dialogue, all I can do is concur. It‘s the reason I keep buying new deessers because one method never does all the tricks. Using volume automation is often the best if I have the time so it‘s often a combination of all methods.
Another excellent video !! I've been using this method for a while. Good to see some confirmation. Strangely I've been noticing a lot more sibilance on new popular Spotify tracks , like maybe tastes are changing a bit.
You won a sub ! Love your videos, very easy and helpful
Unlike other UA-cam vids you are pushing newbies to trust their guts without following a supposedly rigid universal process
Thanks !
This is so interesting - I’ve been doing this for years and I thought only I was doing this. I’ve always felt like this is the best sounding method unless it’s a really bad mic with really weird resonances no matter how soft the consonants are. (it’s happened before)
MY GUY, THIS IS MY NEW FAV TUTORIAL CHANNEL
noicccce and i thought i was the only guy who had that secret...for me de-essing is a automation manual procedure, now i feel better knowing my Kush friend does it the same. cheers. like i said yesterday on you video about mixing the left and right channels independently, im very happy that i found your channel!!!
Nice!
Dude love how you flip from suave AF to NERD on cue. Really need to just swallow my pride now break through my hate for editing automation. Thanks man!
I started doing the same a while ago and found it very effective. I still use De-esser but more as an kind of dynamic eq, and it works really good!
one of my mixing instructors at college taught us this trick. Its also great for de-breathing!
I do something similar, before any processing I clip gain the entire vocal. This includes the sibilence. This way it goes into all processing equally. Most 'automation' is post processing so this trick really works as a stand alone too. Also the melodyne plugin has amazing sibilence identification and control similar this.
I've been mixing for a short while but this was one the first conclusions I made: de-essers are definitely not sexy. I've tried a bunch of different plugins and none of them gave the intended result so on my latest mix I only used manual de-essing technique, exactly how you explain here, and the result was spot on. This is a brilliant tip and very well explained. I wish I had seen this video earlier. It took me about 6 months to come to the conclusion that I don't like, and more importantly, I don't need de-essers. I thought it was my inexperience preventing me from getting the result.
Just bought a subscription. Your vibe sold me.
Hey man...
I was just sitting here (with my dog on my lap) mixing/cleaning up a vocal, and realized I’m using your DS technique...
and it’s awesome !!!
I’ve never been particularly good with the DeEssers (they’re always too much or too little). But you were like “just grab the S’s and pull ‘em down a bit“ and I was like ‘oh hell yeah’ !!!
So I wanted to take a moment and look this video up to comment how MUCH I appreciate your tutelage !!!!
Steve
🤘🤩🤘
That's awesome!
This is fantastic advice, I think I'm actually going to do this for the track I'm working on.
I was taught this trick at uni and it makes such a big difference.
I tend to do this on the lead vocal and then use de-essers further down the line if any Sss need taming after the processing chain, as well as for reverb sends sometimes.
If a track has too many BVs I would stick with De-Essers for them but still manually edit the lead vocal as its the center on the stage.
Excellent tip! Would manually adjust volume instead of compressing but never thought to do it for de-essing as well! Nice one!
Happy to help!
Have had some good results using Trackspacer and side-chaining it to other bright elements in the mix, the snare, hi-hats etc, so it ducks out of the way for those elements. A combination of this and light de-essing ont the vocal is great for the sessions which require a fast turnaround. If there's time in the mix session to automate manually is by far the best way!
This gives me asmr. You are like the Bob Ross of music production.
With a lot of music production videos I always take everything with a grain of salt but I feel as though I can trust your knowledge a lot more than most for some reason. Even if I don't comment, please know that I will be watching every upload :)
Rock on!
The best middle man balanced alternative to de-essing vs automating is dynamic EQing which at the very least can be used in conjunction with everything else to help "get her done" w/ few negative costs(especially if you automate the dynamic EQ on/off based on what you hear that you like vs dont like that its doing).
Without showing any practical treatment you clear all practical issues... Hats off sir...
Thanks :-)
I've been doing this method for a while, but never thought to leave in the transient... Going to try that!
I was actually doing it manually already. Nice to know I aint the only one
I’m glad to hear someone finally talk about this trick
I have hated every de esser plugin I've tried as the artifacts it leaves on my own vocal never sounds good to me in the amount it takes to address the issue... using this technique has been a life saver. Thank you! Now I will have to try every de esser in very minor amounts after I've done this to see which sounds good if I need a little more than volume automation can handle without sounding weird.
i had to subscribed everytime i watch your videos i learn something new!
Yep, that was one of the major learning curves for me - realising that, producing music, I need to take manual control over each single track. And with a digital track count +100, that takes a minute. But, in the end, that shifts my productions from "good" to "great". Hopefully :-).
Thanks. I do this too ... because I lack de-esser skills.
Works great for acoustic guitar squeaks as well. A bell EQ filtre centered on about 2000(as I recall) and have that band just drop out for the squeak. Nobody will notice and the rest of the sound of the guitar stays intact, unlike using the fader.
I find it also works well in a mix. Automate an EQ to duck the mids only when the vocal is going to give a little more space. I’ve never gotten it to work with side chain so I’m quite smitten with this method.
This is an amazing direct practical technique.
Thanks so much.
I don’t mind doing it by hand. It’s a little tedious but you get total control and daws make automation so easy. It’s kind of relaxing and gives me time with the lyrics of a song which helps other areas of the mix in my opinion. Anyway who cares what I think:) Great tip as always! Great content great channel.
Best de-essing vid on YT and trust me I've watched a gazillion. THANKYOU!
Scrolling YT for mixing tuts and seen Kush Afterhours. Kush + Afterhours = A sub from me. I dig these videos and the wealth of info. Keep them coming.
From Day 176 in quarantine: you are really saving me during this pandemic by helping me learn - thank you!
176... yikes. Well, I'm glad we've got something constructive to focus on, I'm not sure what I'd do without music at this point in human history :-)
@@TheHouseofKushTV Oh my gosh, that's EXACTLY it - "at this point in human history" ...ha! That's very tactful of you to put it that way...Sooo well said!! : )
I recently mixed a track with backing vocals doubling the chorus, and I found that the best way to de-ess them was to cut the sibilants out altogether and let the lead vocals' already-automated sibilance carry it. It was seamless, but without the backing vocals meaning 3x the harshness
Yeah, I've done that too.
Same here, works awesome on a double. If I'm dealing with very big stacks that are panned all over the place, muting tends to sound weird and the disruption in the image feels weird, but pulling the sibilants waayyyy down works a treat. I'll do my automation shape but on a buss that all the bvox are fed to, oftentimes just for that one purpose (de-essing)!
Yep same for the breathes
backing vocals you can get away with shelving the highs down a lot of the time too for this reason. Also if you're also in charge of the recording session, getting the backing vocals to be further back in the room can be really nice!
addicted to your videos...
after some years editing tons of vocals and trying a lot of de-essers, to me this is definitely the best way, by far. i guess it might not be the case for all kinds of vocals and music, but it's probably worth to give it a try at least once or twice, and see if that works well for you
This is going to help me so much. When I EQ around 4 or 5 k to reduce the harsh sibilance sounds. Theirs only so much that can do, I'm going to put this into practice.
Oh! Was doing it that way since a while now because I wasn’t smart enough to use the De-Esser! Felt bad about it because I thought it was “unprofessional” 😂 Thanks!
you safe my life. keep helping us out, preach, and preesh!!!!!
I've found the Waves De-Esser is quite good for my own vocals, but definitely going to give this technique a shot, see how it works for me
This is great. Also, sometimes there is a "whistle" or a very frequency specific harshness in the sibilance and I find an EQ like ProQ 2 to be really helpful. I'll just make a narrow cut and render in place.
This has been a game changer for me 🙏🏾
thank you for this! I feel the same about the de-essers and I actually used automation on my s's the other day and it sounded so much better! I don't think I will ever write a song with the word "just" in it again though. what an automation pain that was.
That intro made me think of a character in “red shoe diaries” back in the days 😂
You can do something similar now in Melodyne 5 too. You can ramp down all the sibilants to a certain level then go back in and adjust each one individually.
Great thing!!!! Thanks Gregory 👍
Love hearing someone who really knows pro audio making these videos
Gregory ¨Owen Wilson on wedding crashers¨ Scott rocks. Keep going man
I like doing both. Tad bit of de-essing, and quite a bit of moment to moment automation. But that top end always needs a slight reboost.
find myself doing this more and more. Still like using my multiband compressor for general de-essing though
I have never seen someone on UA-cam talk about production while also having a personality. This is an exception.
For the most part, I agree. However, Airwindows' DeBess does something that other de-essers don't, and I find it really gives a more natural sound than just automating. It alters the wave form so that the harshness of the sibilant is smoothed. It works great on cymbals, as well. You can control the depth of the smoothing, and get a very natural sound. Still, I wouldn't set-and-forget it, but if I had to pick one to set-and-forget, it would be DeBess for sure. Especially since it doesn't attenuate highs to achieve its effect. All the shimmer and goodness stays put, and the harshness goes.
You are so smooth. It’s nice.
Awesome video, super useful, thank you for sharing!
My pleasure! Please tell everyone you know, let's get the word out!
I love this man. Neat and pro just like his products
I've been getting decent results using Melodyne 5 for all of my de-essing and smoothing of plosives. It allows easy editing each S and plosive individually, and makes it easy to locate them
i was also wondering what he would think of meldoyne
Out of frustration, I've been considering optimizing the mid-range on vocals by switching over to a dynamic mic such as the SM7b. But your suggestion offers a much more eloquent solution. My condenser is suddenly looking sexy again.
Right on!! I adore LDC's but I will say, my go-to vocal mic for me and my lady is a ratty old EV-635a, an omni dynamic (!) I got on ebay for like $80. It just sits in a friggin' mix with so little effort, and I LOVE being able to sing to music playing thru the speakers in the room.
I'm not saying to quit your condenser, I'm just saying you may want to experiment anyway. If nothing else it's always good to have different mics for different jobs, like backing vox, it's SO much easier to separate them from the lead if they were recorded with different mics!
new update of melodyne works incredibly well as a deesser actually
exactly what i needed to hear! thank you for the clarity of your point
I've always prefered to automated sibilance, but never heard the suggestion to leave a bit of transient at the begining. Going to try that, thanks!
but b4 daws.... ? they could ONLY de-ess statically, yes? So if that was good enough for all the hits pre-DAW.... well, just wondering. Also, maybe more de-ess when softer vocals happen and less for louder vocals (in general). Great vids! I've been binge-watching these tonight.
There were excellent masters who cut (literally) all vocal artifacts from the rec tapes
Dude if you want to bad enough I'm sure you can come up with a reason not to make a change for the better. That's your choice of course.
They would have multiple people on the board riding faders, all the time.
Very cool advice Greg.
I'll do this 5 times tops in a mix. If there's a lot of issues, I'm using the r de-esser and a hardware compressor with fast attack.
You can also just do this on the pre-mix with clip gain which will ultimately make it even more transparent. Suppose the automation route works as well though
Totally , but it's different to do something like this pre-inserts vs post-inserts (esp. compression & eq). Neither is better, just different.
He mos def is a motivation power house
My brother I luv this channel
Random thought since you mentioned motivation: check out Stephen Pressfield's _The War of Art_ :-)
He said... listhpy... And I fell out of my chair! He is so smooth and refined with his presentation. When he said that one word, it caught me completely off guard!
EDIT: I am rewatching this video and IT GOT ME AGAIN!! 7 months later!!! LOL
Alright - I’m late to the party here. But, thank you man. You saved me a lot of time tonight. I HATE DeEssers. But they can be helpful. (I like to use them on my acoustic guitar bus to soften the attack of my acoustic tracks). But tonight I was mixing a song with simply HORRIBLE Esses. I usually manually grab each Ess (manually) and lower the gain, then cross fade. Using Automation was a total time saver. Thank you for sharing this. Seriously great instruction.
By automate, do you mean the volume?
Yes - pulling the volume down.
Automation is king. Why not use the hell out of it, since all DAWs are capable of it? The human ear is much better suited to making these judgement calls than an algorithm. Love this series Gregory!
This is the best method by far, I use it all the time, sometimes you have a specific ssss (extra strong) and I use an EQ, lowering higher frequencies, yet not necessarily lowering down the volume of the sibilance ... With this "surgical" method you keep "the power" and "the emotion" of the sibilance where is needed ... My problem is I mix outside of computer (in a synth workstation) then I transport the track (vocal) to computer software and do this without music, so I have to repeat the process 2, or three times to get it just right at the right places (when I hear the whole song), but it's worth it ...
Please!!! Please keep doing these!!!
The SA-2 Dialogue Processor from McDSP is a secret weapon in post production mixing. It's a multi-band de-esser designed by a legendary film mixer. Sounds amazing!
Gregory Scott, you totally rock, mister mister! Folks, he's
absolutely right! There's no dodging this. If we want a vocal
to be up front and sexy, we must automate like a champ. More
than any other track, that lead vocal is crying out for TLC... :)
Man, you're taking over the game.
totally agree about no de-esser being perfect. Soothe is about as close as I've got from plugins, but.... my personal favourite way of doing it is to chop all the esses out onto another track, consolidate them as one region, then use the 'open in audio editor' function to open the file in iZotope spectral repair. i hone in on where they're most resonant and piercing and gain those bands down by about 6-9db across the whole file with the horizontal selection tool. i save, return to Logic, and then if need be i can automate the volume of that dedicated channel, although it's usually unnecessary. aside from chopping the esses out, which i'm (hopefully) quick enough to do in one live play-through, the rest of the process takes about a minute. if any of the esses jump out as weird later in the mix, i've got the original audio still there in the main vocal track, which i can bring back in and simply automate, as you describe. esses eh.. can't live with 'em...
I LOVE THAT THERE ARE SO MANY ESSES IN THIS VIDEO!
Totally agree. On a lead vocal. On a 45 minute podcast I’m all about a good de-esser plug-in. :)
Amen! 'Horses for courses,' as applied to dsp!
great video. You guys have to try Melodyne, it allows you to manually go over every single sibilance with a tool called sibilance amplitude. It's amazing, I have automated my vocals in the past, but what Melodyne allows you to do is way easier and totally up to you how much of each sibilant sound you want to pull.
This is some OG ass content 😂😂😂
Couldn't agree more with writing in the volume automation on the esses. At 1st it is seemingly more time-consuming, but the accuracy is far superior and in time, it will save time rather than trying to tune the de-esser in for the entirety of a track. Cheers.
Excellent stuff, as always!
Glad you think so!
This guy is hilarious.
He just look like a weed man 😅🤣 good point old school methods never die
Genius***
Fun fact, he's actually a god from a different dimension. Just came to earth to bless us with some knowledge
Or a combination of both... Use light de-essing with a plugin and then go in with trim automation to find anything still sticking out too much.
de esser adds phase shift tho
Great video!