One of the things that I’ve always struggled with during mixing is de-essing. No matter the tool (and there are many), it’s difficult to strike the perfect balance between a natural sound and overdoing it. It’s especially difficult if you’re getting poorly recorded vocals, which is more the norm these days since so much recording is now done in home studios. Wavefactory has taken a different approach to de-essing, with it’s new Re-Esser plugin, which promises to make the process more precise and easier than ever before, plus add more creativity to the process.
Re-Esser works by intelligently separating sibilance from the tonal elements of your vocal or dialog so you can process each layer independently. This is done with a single control, so you don’t have to worry about setting thresholds and tweaking the frequency.
The Controls
Like most plugins these days, Re-Esser is simple on the surface, but there’s a lot going on under the hood if you’re interested.
The plugin revolves around two main controls – Tonal, which is the body of the sound, and Sibilance, which is the fricative part that we’d like to reduce. Each control comes with a Solo button so you can precisely hear what’s going on in each band. A display shows the two parts of the sound and how they’re being adjusted.
There are two minor controls that also can have great effect on the sound. Sens. (Sensitivity) determines how much of the signal is considered sibilant. Increase this value if you want Re-Esser to catch more of the high-frequency transients, or reduce it if it’s detecting too much. The waveform display will update in real time as you tweak this control.
Smoothing applies temporal smoothing to the detection curve. Higher values make the transition between sibilant and tonal parts more gradual and natural, while lower values make separation sharper and more precise.
The Toolbox
What makes Re-Esser completely different from other de-essers is that you can process each signal path separately. The selection of studio-grade effects include Chorus, Compressor, Convolution, Delay, Enhancer, EQ, Flanger, Limiter, Lo-Fi, Phaser, Pitch Shifter, Reverb, Saturation, Stereo Tools, Tremolo, and Vibrato.
Each effect has its own set of parameters that are displayed in the central editor window.
Wavesfactory Re-Esser is currently on sale for $69 (regularly $99), and is available for both Macs and PCs. You can find out more here, or watch the video below.
