Just to avoid thread hijacking, I’m moving the discussion here.
Here’s what I’ve learned from analyzing de-essers. A “TH” sound is basically a “SS” sound with a bit of a low pass filter. This is why De-essers tend to give a lisp, because they are usually a high frequency compressor, which turns down the SS by filtering out high freqs, but the natural consequence is that it turns into a “TH”
If you turn down the SS, you have to also turn down the low frequencies. Which means you need a solid detector that can know with high level of certainty that the sound it is hearing is an SS sound. This is actually not that hard, as I use Big Beautiful Door to do this. But I think the detector could be a lot more robust with a bit more thought put into it.
feel free to use these vocals as your guinea pig . It has a combination of everything, bad mic technique, no pop shield and good old fashioned sibilance!
Its a 24b 48k Wav dry vocals from my track.
I’ve had the first idea for quite a while now, but I’ve never had the time or need to pursue it further. I even thought of a (somewhat obvious) catchy name: The “Re-Esser”
It actually occurred to me when I was listening to the tracks for a mix comp a few years ago which involved David Crosby. I don’t think the raw tracks were over-de-essed, rather it was simply a denture issue (?) causing all his “s” sounds to lisp noticeably. In fact I’ve noticed this with quite a few singers who are getting on in age…
Anyhow… sounds like something Boz might have some solutions for!..
Boz. I really like the video explanation that you have using Big Beautiful Door. I don’t yet have that plugin, but the video has be considering it for a future purchase. However if you are working on a new plugin just for the vocal aspects (Maybe just a few presets for different types of silibance issues) I’m ready to throw down money for a pre-release purchase right now.
