Sibillant female vocals -- what's your secret trick?

[Dr Huge Longjohns]

Just mixing some tracks where the singer is a girl with seemingly v poor technique. Sibbilance like you've never heard, spitty diction, generally a bit strident to boot. I'm in Logic and have got a long way to making it sound decent with CLA vocal plug in for compression and eq, another compressor to catch peaks, plus manual de-essing at the start of the chain -- as Logic's de-esser just creates lisping, the sibillants are so loud in relation to the rest of the vocal. I know getting a balance between nice brightness and sibillance is an old problem on female vox but anyone got any secret tips --or plug in thoughts -- they have found very successful? Cheers

[Sam Inglis]

Sibilant vocals recorded on over-bright mics are the bane of my life!

In no particular order, here are some things that can help:

(1) Make the rest of the mix really bright (as many modern pop mixes are). At least it won't stand out so much then!

(2) Ruthlessly de-ess any reverb and delay feeds, and make the reverbs and delays quite dark.

(3) Create a duplicate of the vocal track, roll off all the top and bottom and feed it to some sort of saturation plug-in. The idea here is to add some extra frequency content in the mid-range and thus redress the balance between mid and high frequencies. It doesn't always work and usually takes quite a bit of experiment to get the settings right.

(4) Use one of the more modern de-esser designs like FabFilter's Pro-DS, Sonnox's Supresser or the Eioisis E2 De-esser. I think these are generally more effective and more natural-sounding than traditional de-essers like the Logic one.

(5) Re-track the vocals.

[Hugh Robjohns]

This won't help you, but it is worth pointing out for the benefit of others (I hope).

It's another excellent example of how failing to listen critically during the recording stage and dealing with the problem at source (by repositioning the mic and/or changing the mic), turns a minor two-minute problem into a major multiple-hour problem.

Spending a little extra time at the beginning to optimise every aspect of the recorded sound saves so much effort later and always delivers better results.



H

[Sam Inglis]

What Hugh said. I think many people record vocals with the mic too close to the mouth, which makes sibilance a lot worse.

That said, I have run across singers who just are ferociously sibilant, no matter what you do. Even if you put up the darkest ribbon mic in existence on the other side of the room, the sibilance is overwhelming. So sometimes it's maybe just a fact of life.

[Phil O]

Create a duplicate track.

Using a fairly severe notch boost, sweep until you identify the offending frequencies.Attenuate all other beneficial frequencies.

Use the output of this track as a side chain for a compressor strapped across the vocal. Adjust the settings for optimal results.

[Sam Inglis]

Isn't that just what a conventional de-esser does?

[Dr Huge Longjohns]

Thanks Sam, some excellent suggestions there that I hadn't heard before. Will try.

Hugh, yes, I gave the bloke who did the recording as much guidance as I could before he recorded it and sent it to me to mix, but seemingly this fell on deaf ears. Even getting her to think about singing a soft z rather than hard sss can make a huge difference. I think he used a Rode NT2 or something. I used to have an NT1 and found it exceedingly bright and sold it on in the end.

[Dr Huge Longjohns]

Using a fairly severe notch boost, sweep until you identify the offending frequencies.Attenuate all other beneficial frequencies.

Use the output of this track as a side chain for a compressor strapped across the vocal. Adjust the settings for optimal results.

Yes, I think a regular de-esser does this. In the end I just went in and manually reduced the level of each sssss with drawn-in automation. You can see the sibillants on the waveform--louder than the notes in some cases!

[Dr Huge Longjohns]

FabFilter's Pro-DS, Sonnox's Supresser or the Eioisis E2 De-esser.

Sam, looks like the Eioisis no longer exists? Maybe it de-essed itself out of existence.. Eioisssssisssssss...bang!

[The Elf]

When you mix for clients who track themselves you often have to deal with what you're given.

In this situation I would try a de-esser first, but if the problem is very bad then the side-effects are often worse than the essing. I have a few tricks in my bag...

- Cut the vocal at the start of hard esses and apply a fade-in.
- Ride the esses with automation - volume or LP filter, or both.
- Cut the esses onto a separate track, reduce the volume of the esses and cross-fade the two vocal tracks to hide the transitions.
- Cut and replace esses from elsewhere.
- Mult the vocal to separate the low and high frequencies of the vocal, then process/ride the esses only.
(A quick Youtube search shows a video HERE covering frequency splitting. My method is slightly different to this, and produces a perfect null, but it's close enough.)

Of course, you can combine any of the above!