Marooned...and Sibilance

Yesterday was finally the day to work on "Marooned (Not Lost)", the biggest problem track that I've had on this album, and I of course began by starting over, undoing what garbage I had created in the previous handful of mixes.  This once again proved to be the right solution and I can't overstate how important it is to NOT be afraid to just throw cr*p out that simply isn't working.

I didn't have as much time to work on the song as I had wanted but I completely remixed the drums, worked heavily on the guitars and vocals, and even worked with the scratch keyboard track that I had laid down back in May.  I walked away with a pretty good sounding track, albeit not completely done but definitely on the right road.  This one has now been taken off the "problem track" list.

I do want to mention that sibilance hasn't really been too major of an issue for me anymore.  I completely destroyed two of my albums in the past due to excessive sibilance in my vocals, which is a real drag and mood killer, let me tell you, and I've personally found for me that using multiple de-essers along the vocal chain seems to work wonderfully, each one taking a little bit out at a time.  It depends on the song, of course, and the vocalist, but my voice has had some really harsh "s" sounds ever since my teeth started shifting back in my 30's.  I've learned to control it a lot more when singing and recording, and let me say that takes some true discipline to do, but there are always some strong "s" sounds coming through.  I've tried a few different de-essers along the way but the built-in for ProTools usually works the best, in my opinion.  The goal is to always make sure you're not taking out too much at any point.

If the de-essers don't fix the vocals completely, and I've had that be the case here and there, there are two other powerful tools to use in your arsenal:  one being fades, that is if the "s" is at the beginning or end of a word and is spaced in a manner that you can fade it in a natural sounding way, and the other being the semi newer PT functionality called "clip gain".  I have really played around with clip gain adjustments over the past year and I must say that I love them, and I now use them all the time.  They're really simple to use and quite forgiving, not to mention way more trustworthy than automation.  In fact, I've had enough issues with automation over the years that I use it as little as possible.  I'd much prefer knowing that my mix is "hard coded" to do something rather than rely on automation working during the bounce, and I've had it more than once not work.

With clip gain, the idea is that if you have a really bad sibilant section of a word, at least lower the volume of that exact section so that you're more or less doing a manual de-ess on it.  I've found that it works amazingly well.  It was one of the newer functions added to ProTools quite a few years ago that I found to be super helpful but I had never really worked with it until recently.

I was supposed to work on "Our Satellite's Collide" today but it's going to be tricky since the men's semifinals are on for the US Open.  I'll mix where and when I can but I doubt it's going to be a heavy work day.  Oh well...  I guess I can relax a bit one day of my week off.