In this week’s Audio Premium content, Bobby Owsinki continues his series on compression. This week we look at the best way to set up and use gates and de-essers.
To learn more about what you get as part of Audio Premium, read this. To take a peek inside this tutorial, hit the jump!
Sometimes a vocal has a short burst of high-frequency energy where the “S’s” are over-emphasized, and this is known as “sibilance.” It comes from a combination of lack of mic technique by the vocalist, poor mic placement, the type of mic used, and heavy compression on the vocal track. Sibilance is nasty sounding and something that’s highly undesirable, so a special type of compressor called a a de-esser is used to combat it (see Figure 1). A properly tuned de-esser works on only a selected narrow band of frequencies between 3k and about 8kHz to eliminate sibilance.
Most de-essers have only two controls; Threshold and Frequency. Threshold sets the level where the de-esser begins to work, while Frequency allows you to select the exact frequency where the sibilance is occurring. Some de-essers also have a button called Listen that allows you to solo only the frequency that’s being compressed, which can be helpful in finding the exact offending frequency range, while others have a Range control, that allows you to set the exact amount of attenuation.
Get the Full Tutorial!
Didn’t hear about Audio Premium? It’s an additional, in-depth tutorial, published each week just for our Premium subscribers (on top of all our regular free content!)
Existing Premium members can log-in and download.
Join Premium and Expand Your Audio Knowledge!
For those unfamiliar, the family of Tuts+ sites runs a premium membership service. For $9 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies from Nettuts+, Psdtuts+, Cgtuts+,Activetuts+, Phototuts+, Aetuts+, and Vectortuts+! For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business.
Become a Premium member and download this tutorial today!
What Do You Want to See on Premium?
Is there a specific technical aspect of audio production that you really want to learn more about? How about a very advanced technique that you could never quite grasp fully?
We really want to make our Premium content as relevant and useful to you as possible, so do send through your comments and requests to [email protected]. Let us know what you want to see, and we’ll commission top-notch audio experts to teach you!
{excerpt}
Read More