Best way to reduce hiss sound in the letter S when recording voiceover

[FleeceActress]

Hello all, I would imagine this is a fairly common issue, but when I searched for any previous posts, I couldn't find anything addressing it (please feel free to direct me to any such threads that may already exist.)

When I record voiceovers, sometimes I hiss a little too much when I pronounce an "S" sound, and I am wondering what is the best means of reducing that?

I realize I can just use the Amplify tool to de-amplify that section (and that's normally what I do) but I was wondering if anyone had a better way?

Thanks so much! Fleece

[kozikowski]

That's sibilance and you can suppress it with a DeEsser plugin.

The only downside I've ever found is the DeEsser tool is absolute. It's up to you to get the work within range of the tool, or know where the work is so the tool can be adjusted to find it.

There is no "Go find the Essing and call me when you're done."

I found it handy to take voice work through Audiobook Mastering first to get the voice at a standard volume, and then apply DeEssing. That's not a bad idea anyway because the Audiobook people use a fairly standard sound format.

This is the crazy long version. It's actually only three tools. Scroll down to Process.

https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Audiobook_Mastering

Follow that with the DeEsser tool from here.

viewtopic.php?f=42&t=79278

At these settings.

Screen Shot 2019-11-04 at 15.50.37.png (210.03 KiB) Viewed 344 times

Enjoy. Post back if you get stuck. This process produces even volume, matched sound files with little or no Essing.

Koz

[Trebor]

The magic word is "de-esser"
There are two specific de-esser plug-ins for Audacity ...
Steve's ... viewtopic.php?p=344804#p344804
Paul-L's ... viewtopic.php?p=245549#p245549

[kozikowski]

So, that's yes. There are ways and tools to fix this.

Koz