Using the de-esser on vocals

Sometimes a vocal has short bursts of high-frequency energy where the S's are…overemphasized, and this is known as sibilance.…A se-esser, which is a selective frequency compressor, helps eliminate…this undesirable effect.…Let's see how to use it.…The first thing we'll do is we'll listen to a vocal that has a lot of sibilance.…Let's solo it up and listen.…(music playing)…Now you can hear the S's just jump out.…There is way too much there.…So the first thing we are going to do is insert, under dynamics, it says De-esser,…and this is the plain-vanilla de-esser that comes with Pro Tools.…

The first thing we are going to do is we are going to hit the Listen button and…we are going to try to zero in on the frequency where the sibilance happens.…(music playing)…So it seems like about 6.1 kHz, right around there is where we have the S's.…

So now the next thing is to set how much sibilance is attenuated.…(music playing)…Now it's attenuated a lot here.…Let's listen to what happens.…(music playing)…So as you can hear, there are hardly any S's there, and it just doesn't sound good.…