The music space in the new place.
I was recently working on a song and the sibilance was just a little too much for me. Like anything in audio there several ways of accomplishing the same task and different people will have different opinions but these are a few ways that I found to be effective.
1. Automate Each and Every Sibilance (The Manual Approach)
There’s a thread with this in Gearslutz (link) that offers a very good solution. It is basically to put a trim plug in and then automate the volume of the trim plug-in on each sibilance. This way is also completely free and similar to compressing by riding a volume fader.
Advantages- No artifacts, Cost-effective, You can choose how much you want to decrease each sibilance, Doesn’t interfere with volume automation for the track and you can bypass the plug-in or go back and tweak if needed.
Disadvantages- Can be time consuming if there are lots of background vocal tracks or doublings, Can’t be saved as a setting that can be applied to future or similar vocal tracks.
Photo from Gregory Scott’s Gearslutz post
“I put this on a trim plug so it’s separate from volume automation, makes it much easier to edit as the mix progresses.
If you slide your first two nodes to the right, you can let as much or as little transient thru as you’d like. If you add nodes, you can put the transient at one level and the ess at another.
Each sibilant (ess or tzz or chhh or fff) is tuned by ear, so the amount of control is unparalleled. Once you get up to speed, you can do a whole track in about 5 minutes. Sibilants are very easy to spot visually, they’re much denser and faster than anything else on the track.”
-Gregory Scott – ubk
2. Use a De-Esser Plug-in (The Automatic Approach)
When a De-Esser plug-in is set correctly it can be fast and easy. However it usually takes a little time to find the problem frequency, then to set the threshold so it doesn’t get triggered by other material, and then to have it work for many different sections of the track. There’s quite a bit to take into account and you will most likely need to automate some of the parameters of the De-Esser to get it right. There are some videos on Pensado’s Place that go over this in the Into The Lair Section. Pensado’s Place is definitely a show worth checking out, he is very knowledgeable, a Grammy Award winning mixer and a genuinely nice guy sharing what he has learned working in music.
One method I found works for me when using a De-Esser plug-in is to set the frequency band to be fairly wide and to use a shelf shape instead of just notching out a narrow frequency band. Usually the offending frequencies fall between about 4k to 12k but I’ve gotten good results using a hi-shelf shape at 6k and about 6db of gain reduction. When I was using a narrow band it wasn’t really taking out all of the harshness that I wanted. I also have read using multiple narrow bands but I would most likely use the manual method before resorting to this.
Advantages: Once set correctly it can save you from having to automate each sibilance, It can take out just the upper frequencies and leave the un-offending frequencies in tact, Can be saved as a preset so if you recorded many tracks with the same singer, the same microphone in the same studio then it should be pretty close for each vocal track, The attack and release times can be set on some De-Essers.
Disadvatages: Can sometimes need automation to get right, If the De-Esser is triggered too much it can give the singer a lysp.
Note: De-Essing can also be thought of as frequency dependent side-chain compression. A multiband compressor has many similarities of a standard De-Esser plug-in and is a good way to visualize what a De-Esser is doing.
Conclusion:
There isn’t really one way that will work for every singer in every song so experimentation is required to find out what’s best.
Step 1
Open the Mixer Window
Step 2
Click on the first fader and click learn
Step 3
Click on Fader number one so the assignment looks like this.
Step 4
Continue with the other faders in the same way until you get to number 8.
Step 5
Assign 2 buttons that you will use to bank to the left and the right by banks of 8. Make sure the one to left is multiplied by -1 and the one to the right is multiplied by +1 in the value section at the bottom. Also in the value section set the min to 0 and max to 8. The mode button seems to work now even though they are different for each of my buttons but I would say scaled or relative would be the ones to try first.
This is a video I made to demonstrate how long MS really are, especially when using audio compression.
The way to use this is to hear how long it takes for the second rim shot hit. It’s easiest to just watch it the whole way through the first time and then scroll through and find a specific number.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Download the video here:
http://blog.joeclarmusic.com/movies/MSReference
This is a track I made during the election of 2008.
Photo Credit: http://tribewithted.mlblogs.com/yes-we-can-800px.png
In the times of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven there was no recorded music. While I was reading a few chapters form George Martin’s Book, All You Need Is Ears, it really got me thinking about the way recording music is today. In George Martin’s book he talks about how some composers would never get to hear some of the compositions they had written because the scores had to be played with an entire orchestra in the room. Most of the time there wasn’t enough funding for the for the lesser known composers. Now you can input a score into a software program like Finale or Sibelius and it can play through it so you can get an idea of how it will sound.
In addition to the composer not being able to hear his own music, the fans wouldn’t be able to hear it either. If they really liked the song they would have to go down to the concert hall when the orchestra was playing. There was no way to hear the song more than once in a row. Think of your favorite song and how many times you’ve played that.
The following controllers I have either owned or used and they are the best ones that I’ve seen on the market. The book I included is one that I had to get for a class and it has a lot of excellent techniques to use when sequencing MIDI.
The advantage of the pad kontrol is that it has roll and flam built into the XY pad which makes it handy for making snare drum parts.
If you have any questions feel free to ask.
