The word sibilance is used to describe a particular type of sound
centered around 7 kHz that occurs most often in vocals when the consonants “s”, “st”, and “ch” etc. are pronounced producing a high pitched tone that is heard as hissing. Sibilance is something that all sound engineers must deal with in vocal recordings as these sounds are quite often much louder then the rest of of the vocal track and are interpreted as an unpleasant tonal harshness.
When sound engineers are interested in removing sibilance the process is called “de-essing” because it is usually the letter “s” that causes the most problems.
De-essing can be done in Ableton in many ways,
however the easiest way is to download and install a 3rd party plugin such as iZotope or Waves. Here’s a brief set of instructions for de-essing in Ableton using 3 different methods.
Music Word of the Day
https://musicterms.artopium.com/s/Sibilance.htm
Every day I make an attempt to add a little bit more music and art knowledge to the Internet, one word at a time. Realizing there aren’t many comprehensive and complete online music and art dictionaries, I set out on a mission to compile my own.
https://musicterms.artopium.com
I recently fell in love with the waves De-esser after somehow managing to miss it completely all these years. In general on Xels vocal chain i use a multi band comp to do basic de-essing and then would add third party options in post production. Nectar 2 is part of my chain, and last year i started using the Fabfilter bundle which has prob the most advanced de-esser currently being used in the game, but it tends to really change the tone and character of the vocals if used on verses with heavy amounts of sibilance, so alas i stumbled through my vst banks and luckily for me (and all our listeners) I landed on the waves de-esser a few months ago. Shit is Uber simple and introduces nearly zero latency, plus to my ears is completely transparent. So dope. nice post bro. Hey we are dropping new song and video today fyi!!!
Yeah, I watched a bunch of Dave Pensado's videos at one point at every time he introduced a de-esser or some thing like that he also always made sure to mention Waves. It's a definite go to.
Great! I am on board with your mission. Imparting knowledge one word at a time is a great idea and a highly worthy service.
Why thank you! I'm encourged!
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Interesting, Ableton, that is some really cool software for real music pros. Thanks for sharing!