De-essing vocal tracks

Unresolved sibilance can cause problems later. Here are various ways to get it sorted in a snap

- Jon Musgrave

Jon is a London-based platinum award-winning mixer, producer, composer and club remixer with a diverse CV that spans dance, pop, rock and music for media. He's also a long-term contributor to Computer Music. Jon usually handles final mixdowns, which is why we've got him to share some of his pearls of mixing wisdom here...

De-essing is the process of reducing the sibilance in vocal recordings. These bursts of high frequencies are primarily produced by the letter ‘s’ (hence the name), but can also be created by ‘t’ and to some degree ‘f’, ‘sh’ and ‘ch’.

Sibilance is at its worst when close miking and there are various tips and tricks you can use to reduce it at the recording stage. Nevertheless, here we’re focusing on mixing and we’ll assume you have some existing sibilant vocals that need sorting out.

Often when you first hear a vocal, the sibilance is not that obvious. However, once you start compressing it or boosting higher frequencies to add air and sheen, the sibilance gets magnified and becomes a problem. If we don’t address it at the mixing stage, it can be very hard to reduce transparently during mastering, and if you’re mastering to vinyl, unresolved bursts of high frequencies can cause distortion when cutting the master lacquer.

In this masterclass, we’ll look at different approaches to sibilance including understanding and using de-essers, applying manual level correction and also the interaction between sibilance and reverb. Of course, these harsh frequencies can also be present in other instruments such as cymbal crashes, and we’ll finish up with a look at how we can use the latest de-esser processors to remove harshness from these. Right, let’s get to it…

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