I remember @AJ113 saying something not long ago about how he completely removes any sibilance from background vocals. It seemed like a strange idea, but I just tried it, and it’s super cool. Here’s a video that shows how I use a plugin to do it, but you could edit by hand and get the same result.
Also, thanks to @Cristina for supplying the awesome vocals.
I think it’s mega cool that you can do this, separate the S out from the rest of the vox. How the hell do you do that? If I could sing I’d get this plugin. How much does it cost?
S
It’s actually easier than you would think. It takes the opposite approach from a de-esser. A de-esser looks for high frequency stuff to determine if it’s a sibilant, but this has two fundamental flaws:
This takes the opposite approach and looks for any sound that has low frequencies because sibilants almost never have low frequencies unless you happen to be blowing on the mic while saying “SSSS.” When you look at it that way you can basically say that anything that isn’t a voiced sound is a sibilant.
It’s very rare that you have a voiced sibilant sound, especially in english. Words like “genre” or “Kim Jong” but usually those sounds have a very soft sibilant sound it’s safe to ignore them.
Nice. 
Not sure if you are aware, but the plugin has also attenuated the ‘j’ of John, (also nice), but has not (regrettably) touched the ‘k’ of karl, which I would also delete if I deemed necessary (certainly in this specific case).
Also, I don’t want to give you grief but, in any given group of harmonies I may or may not delete the sibilance - it’s not a given. Each one is taken on its own merits. I’m not so sure a plugin can have that degree of ‘subjectivity’.
Yeah, I noticed that one too. I’m actually working on a prototype to make this whole process easier to set up and hopefully more accurate. It would have to be its own plugin, but would operate of the same idea, just more streamlined to the purpose.
And it’s certainly not a given, but man, as a blanket process, it worked way better than not having it on there. I’m sold on the idea, and would consider keeping BG vocals sibilants the exception rather than the rule.
OK well I guess that’s all that matters in the end. [quote=“bozmillar, post:5, topic:1454”]
I’m sold on the idea
[/quote]
Glad to be of help.
That’s great! Seems to work well. I used that idea (manually through editing the audio) on a song I did about a month ago. I thought it gave fantastic results, and it seems like a great time saver to automate it like that.
Bastards. Might have to buy it.
I used to do this by manually cutting those sibilant freqs. I got lazy doing it over and over so i tried routing all the bv to a buss and use a multicomp agressively on the sibiance. It works as well. But i havent really tried this method. Great idea!!! :beerbang: