"S" and "sh" problem

[Rzarek]

Hello!

I am preparing a short commercial soundtrack which consists of my song made in Orion and some speech recorded with a wireless microphone while shooting. So far I have prepared a few such tracks, but for the first time I have to deal with a non-reader's, no studio quality talking. I've spent a lot of time to clean up the actress voice in Audacity so I it almost ready to be mixed (in OP). Unfortunately the actress has some kind of speech impediment which is especially gross after using compressor. Her "s" and "sh" are terribly prominent. I've heard of de-essers, even downloaded VST one, but it does not seem to work or (more probable) I don't know how to use it correctly. Could you please give me some advice?

[Icaro]

YES..... shoot the vocalist!

[Dungeon Studio]

Hate to say Razarek, you might have to go in and manually clamp down the s's with a fade - either in or out. IE; the sentence is 'Stop selling snakes', you'd carefully fade in the portion of the first three words and carefully fade out the last as welll. Complete PITA I agree. But, on close up views the s's are fairly evident as spikey noise clusters. So just highlighting those areas and executing fade in/out's should improve the track greatly.

As long as you don't have to work with this chick!

[V/M]

consider if you REALLY need the compressor

[Icaro]

it's a hungarian thing. A lot of my students have that exact same problem. Another big one is with the 'v' and the 'w'

[Dungeon Studio]

I find S's easier to fix than booming P's and T's (and sometimes K's)
Never heard of V's or W's before? How could they be more problematic in Hungarian over English pronounciations? Unless it's the placement and phonetics after? Like Prizzi in Itallian, the two z's make it prounced 'Prit-say'. But would never want to hear Giovanni say 'Prizzi has a itsy-bitsy of the frizzies today. Get a some hair spray. eh?'

[Icaro]

hehehehe..... I was just being funny.... but in case you're really interested.... the is no diffrence between the 'v' and 'w' in hungarian. so, when going over web etiquette I usually hear veeveevee.something.com

kind of charming actually

[Icaro]

maybe Lance could tell you something about it.

another one is the 'th' as in thursday. It's really hard for them....... but there are several sounds in hungarian that are a total bitch for me to pronounce.

[Dungeon Studio]

You leg puller you! :rofl: The ones I really have to watch how people say are 'statistics' and amazingly the word 'serious'. I'm not sure if it's South Park that started it with Al Gore and his Man-Pig alerts - 'I'm being serial here people! Really serial!' But it's seem to have crept into daily speech somehow. Even for people who've never seen South Park at all. I'll say something like 'Bin Laden apparently made another tape again?' and they reply 'Are you serial...I mean serious?' And my jaw just drops. Okay if you're a South Park fan doing a Al Gore impersenation... Otherwise, it really sounds retarded and ignorant.

The worst sentence ever to be spoken and recorded...
"Cher stops speaking seriously about statistic's and propigates pandamonium for Wolf Blitzer and Larry King' - Anyone that can complete and record that successfully without screens or comp's should be be given an Achievement Award. :superlol:

[Eklectro]

use some editor or zoom in a lot and applys volume change in a first time.
a de esser will work for an entire song or for live perf.

[epilogue]

Being that I'm too lazy to ready to see if someone else suggested this, I'll just spout it.

Use a compressor/PEQ on the BandFX container (with the PEQ/Compressor on the trouble range). It'd also help to find where the spikes' frequencies lie by using something like Voxengo Span or similar plugin to visualize the sound.

[Kriminal]

http://www.digitalfishphones.com/

http://www.digitalfishphones.com/main.p ... &subItem=5

[ufo]

I love that blockfish. I often use the gentle bus setting and the saturation is really nice.

[Icaro]

has anyone had much luck with the spitfish? For me, it makes things sound muddy, as if the plug-in should be called mudpuppy instead of spitfish.

The other plug-ins work great for me.

[Rzarek]

Hi!

Thanks a lot for your advice! Finally I managed to prepare an acceptable version (at least acceptable for me, as my client is... incredibly demanding... never met anyone like this one before!).

First of all, using Audacity, I precisely faded all that damn "s", "sh" and palatal s "¶" (as you see, we've got quite a lot of sybillants in Polish). That was kind of useful due to another reason - after zooming I spotted some more artifacts which emerged after denoising.

Then, as V/M suggested, I considered using compressor. Without it, the voice seemed rather dull. But apart from the sybillants, there were too many defects in the recording (eg. some denoising jitter) which got exposed after compressing. So I decided not to use compressor as it brings more harm than profit in this case. By the way, on Sunday I found Paul White's "Recording and Production Techniques" in the bookstore. The chapters about Vocals and Dynamics Control were really useful to understand my problem.

I decided to do some kind of compression manually, creating a precise amplitude envelope in Audacity. Well, it's not what actual compressor does, but the track souded better.

I put that clean voice track into OP and added rendered song on the second channel.

Next i tried that Spitfish on the voice track. Very easy to use and effective, I have to admit. Well, probably my ear is not trained enough to hear its muddiness, it seems quite OK for me.

The track started to sound decently, but I decided to do some EQ treatments. I used spectrum analyser and noticed that "s", "sh" and "¶" appear in different ranges, so I delicately lowered their gains with PEQ.

Finally I tried "ducking" technique of which I read in White's book - I put compressor on the song and sidechained it to the voice track. Then I used an exciter on master bus.

Well, probably these are some complete basics of audio editing, but I am really happy I've learnt something;).