#clip gain

[visionrecordingstudios-blog]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDglU074lJI)

[mennismusicproduction]

How to Deal With Sibilance

Sibilance is the bane of my life when I'm mixing.

I love rock music and hard hitting, double or triple tracked vocals with some nice harmonies. But all the compression and high end you pump in to a lead vocal causes the "S" sounds to be almost unbearable, an improperly de-essed track will sound harsh and piercing at loud volumes. Not something you want in your mixes!

Here are a couple ways to deal with it:

Many people use De-Essers, to great effect, simply spending the time to home in on the frequency that has strong resonance and is offending most in the upper frequency spectrum and applying the correct amount of gain reduction to get rid of the harshness.

I simply cannot stand De-Essers.  

For my tastes, the attack times are too slow and the release times are too quick on the de-essers I've used. If you really push the amount of gain reduction you're doing you can hear these bad attack and release times along with pumping. The results just don't match up to my expectations. I much prefer using clip gain to take the volume of each sibilant sound down to a good level. This method doesn't attenuate any of the important high frequencies that we are trying so hard to push into our vocals to achieve clarity and character. 

It's a pain, but it's worth it in my mind. 

Have a great day music makers!