Today we’ll talk more about the de-esser, or more specifically, how you can make one if you haven’t got one. Many early de-essers used in broadcast were actually not de-essers, but homebrew stuff. And it’s not as hard as it sounds. You won’t have to touch a single screw. You will need a compressor and an EQ.

The trick is to “tune” the compressor to react to certain frequencies where sibilants occur. The easy way to find this is to take your EQ, boost one of the bands, drag it cross the frequency spectrum and listen to where the esses occur. Perhaps try around 5-6kHz.

Originally posted on January 10, 2009 @ 6:29 pm