What the S is a DE-ESSER? And what's the scoop on the Sweep?
You know what, I like that idea.
You know, I never realized before that you were so versatile.
Hey, hey guys. Welcome back to the Pod Sound School. Or if this is your first time here,
I'm Studio Steve, and on our channel you'll find all the resources you need to start up
a podcast or to improve the podcast you already have.
On today's episode we are going to be covering DE-ESSERs and EQ sweeping. We get questions
all the time from our Podskies about EQing, but recently we've had a question about what
is a DE-ESSER? And, what does it mean to Sweep the EQ? So on this short video I'm going to
quickly show you what a DE-ESSER is and what it means to Sweep the EQ to adjust and sweeten
up your podcast voices.
This isn't going to be a tutorial on any one software or on any one digital audio workstation,
but I'm going to try to make it quick and show you how a DE-ESSER and EQ units are essentially
the same, no matter what digital audio workstation you're in. And I'm going to illustrate that
by showing you how a DE-ESSER and an EQ Sweep works inside of Pro Tools First, and then
in Adobe Audition, and then finally in GarageBand.
So stick around until the end of the video so you can have a strong understanding about
what a DE-ESSER is and how you can Sweep the EQ range to really gain control over your
podcast mixes. We're not just haphazardly selecting presets, we actually understand
what these tools we're using on our voices are.
It doesn't take a long time to learn, so stick around.
And before we dive in, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and join the Pod Sound
School YouTube community. And also hit the bell, that way you can be notified when we
post new videos each week.
Okay guys, let's get to it.
So before we get into talking about what a DE-ESSER is and how to sweep through the EQ
range, we need to make sure we understand EQs and human hearing, and what the ranges
of EQs are. So let's just do a quick refresh on some EQ basics.
The range of human hearing goes from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. In order to effectively have control
and intention over our podcast mixes, we need to understand the EQ Spectrum Specific to
Voices. So let's walk through all of the frequency ranges from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, really quick,
and just talk about how our voices react within those frequency ranges.
First, let's start at 20 Hz to 80 Hz. Here voices don't really go this low, but here
plosives are very common. Plosives are the pa pa sound that happens when air hits the
microphone. So a really common practice here is to use a high pass filter.
What's a high pass filter you ask? Well, a high pass filter is an EQ setting, basically,
that will only allow the high frequencies to pass through while restricting the low
frequencies from passing through. This is such a common effect, it's actually built
in on a lot of your common microphones. You'll notice on a condenser microphones, and even
dynamic microphones, that you'll see this symbol. It's a line with a slope that curves
downwards. That's a high pass filter.
High pass filters like this, on microphones, are usually set to make the slope or to start
restricting the low frequencies right at 80 Hz, sometimes 100 Hz. So if you have a microphone
that has a high pass filter, just select that and you're good to go. Or, I'll show you in
a moment where you can access that in your EQ units on your DAW's.
Okay, so let's move on to 80 Hz to 160 Hz. Here's what I like to call the tasty lows.
To give you an idea of where 80 Hz is, the Low E string of a guitar, it's fundamental
tone is at 82.5 Hz. This area is really where our vocal warmth comes from. This is the chest
noise, or the buttery, really intelligible, nice sound of our voices, so we want to be
careful not to cut too much here. This is a nice place.
Okay, now let's talk about 200 Hz to 250 Hz. We often use the term muddy to talk about
this range. Sometimes this is also thought of the head cold range because when we have
a head cold this seems to be the range we're hearing in. This is a good place if you have
a male voice and a female voice on your podcast, to make some cuts here on the male voice,
and you'll notice that helps to differentiate between the male and the female voice.
Okay, now let's move on to the range 300 Hz to 1 kHz, or 1,000 Hz. These are our high-mids.
Inside of this range, it's a pretty big range, there's usually always an area that you can
cut a little bit that will help to clean up your voice. Starting at 500 Hz to 900 Hz,
we really start to get this nasal sound coming from our voice. Think the teacher from the
Charlie Brown cartoons. Also, within this range, from 300 Hz all the way up to a k,
this is where a lot of the reverb and the room sound comes from into our microphone.
If we have a lot of reverb in our recordings, making some big or some nice cuts in this
area here can help to clean that up lot. It won't completely fix or eliminate the reverb,
but it will help your voice to sound a little more clear and a little more professional.
And, moving on, let's talk about 2 kHz to 4 kHz. This is where we most recognize human
speech. It's not of the place of clarity and presence, but because our ears have evolved
over so many years to recognize human speech here, they are also sensitive at this frequency
range, so ear fatigue and ear exhaustion can happen if we make boosts too much in this
range, so be careful with that.
Okay, now, 5 kHz to 10 kHz. This is the high end. This is where we have hissing and squealing.
This can be painful in this area to the ears, and this is also where we have the S noises,
or where they're most prevalent. This is the range where are going to apply a DE-ESSER.
10 kHz to 20 kHz, or 10 k to 20 k. This is the air, or the crispy sounds. It's the really
high stuff. Here you will find some problematic issues sometimes, like buzz or fluorescent
lights, or the refrigerator buzz will really be prevalent in this area. Sometimes also,
certain microphones have a lot of high response and it can be nice to just cut a little bit
in this area.
Okay, so that does it for a quick refresher in EQ. Now let's hop into Pro Tools First
and talk about what a DE-ESSER is.
Okay, so first off, what is a DE-ESSER? A DE-ESSER is what it sounds like, it de-esses
our voice. And how it does this is it works similar to a compressor, and that's why it's
considered a dynamic effect. And the reason it works like a compressor is because it applies
a gain reduction. But rather than applying a gain reduction over the whole range of frequencies,
it does it based off of a selected frequency. This is really cool.
Let's say your S noises are really over blaring and they're hurting your ears. You might just
think, okay, well if I know the S noises are between 5 and 10 k, I'm just going to put
an EQ unit on my voice and I'm going to reduce that area. But if you do that, you'll lose
out on a lot of those little crispy, nice noises, and when we're not saying the S noises.
So by using a DE-ESSER, you apply a threshold, so to speak, or a range, that tells the DE-ESSER
every time something in the 7 k region comes over this line to heavily, like when you say
S or Z, cut it down a certain amount, just the same way a compressor works, but only
based off of that. How cool is that?
And let me show you how easy it is and how it works here in Pro Tools.
I'm just going to open up the DE-ESSER that comes with Pro Tools. Remember I said it's
a dynamic effect, so you will find De-ESSERs in all of your DAW's, usually under dynamics.
We'll go to a DE-ESSER here and here it is. If you look very first to the presets that
you can find here, and if we were to go to Female DS, you see that it puts it at 7 kHz.
A male DS, it is going to give it to us at 6 kHz. That's right between 5 and 10. I very
often use 6 kHz on my voice.
So here on this track that I've recorded, that says S here, this little clip, it's me
reading sentences that have a lot of S noises in them. So let's watch this run through the
DE-ESSER and see how it works.
The salad has lettuce and tomatoes.
The seven sailors were seasick.
The rose has a ...
That's great, and you can see here, from where it says GR, that stands for gain reduction,
that it's killing about six DB's at the big spikes.
Should I send Sam six rock?
That's great. Now I think that 7 k might be a better area for me here.
And now let's listen to it with and without the DE-ESSER and see what kind of difference
you can notice. Let's just listen to this, and I'll play it by bypassing it, we'll listen
without and then immediately after I will un-bypass it and we'll listen to it with it.
Should I send Sam six rocks?
What you'll notice there is we still hear a lot of those S noises, they're just not
as harsh. So this DE-ESSER is so quick, it's so easy to apply it to your podcast voices.
It's not going to totally kill a lot of the airy nice [Sey 00:09:23] quality that comes
within the 5 to 10 k range, it's just going to help to control those wild S's. So that's
wonderful.
Okay, so now that we know DE-ESSER, let's talk about EQ sweeping.
What is EEQ sweeping? Well, to illustrate that for you, let me open up a parametric
EQ, or just to the EQ that comes with Pro Tools right here. And it says EQ Seven Band.
That means it has seven different bands of EQs.
Now that we have this EQ unit up, let's listen to how my voice works through this EQ. With
the frequencies that we just talked about in mind, let's start adjusting this EQ a little
bit. First off, remember we talked about the high pass filter, well look, here's one right
here, HPF, that's a high pass filter. So we would come here where it says in and we would
bring that in, and then right here it says frequency, we could just type in 80 Hz, and
now the high pass filter is being applied right at 80 Hz.
The salad has ...
That's going to help with plosives and it was an easy, simple thing.
Now I have control over that low, or any rumble or trucks driving by, that'll help to eliminate
that as well.
Okay, so now let's talk about EQ sweeping. What EQ sweeping is is basically turning the
EQ all the way up so that you can really pinpoint different frequencies and how they sound on
your voice. What the best way to do this is, like I just did, turn the gain all the way
up and then change the Q or the width of the slope so that it's nice and pinpointed like
this, and then, as you play your voice through it, you can sweep the EQ left to right and
get a sense of how the frequencies sound on your voice. And you can see right here it'll
change the frequency number so you can get a good idea of how these frequencies are sounding
on your voice.
Since we just talked about 250 Hz to 250 Hz, let's sweep around there and see if we can
hear some cardboard or some muddy noises in my voice that might be good to reduce a little
bit.
The salad has lettuce and tomatoes.
The seven sailors were seasick.
The rose has a zillion thorn ...
Then what I like to do here is I also like to make the width a little bit bigger in here,
a little bit more of the surrounding frequencies around the frequency I have selected.
The salad has lettuce and tomatoes.
The seven sailors were seasick.
Yeah, I think right around 230, 239 here, it would be nice to cut just a little bit
out of that, to open up some more of the frequencies and make sure that my voice doesn't have that
mud. That mud didn't sound very good to me.
The salad has lettuce and tomatoes.
Okay. Now, remember we talked about between 300 Hz and 1 kHz, that reverb can be a problem.
Well I have over here a reverb track I've recorded, in a very reverberated room. Let's
just have a peep to it real quick.
And now we're recording in a room with a lot of reverb.
So, now, let's sweep through the frequency range here on the mid frequencies or a high-mid
frequency band. Let's turn it all the way up and adjust the slope, the Q, or the width,
and let's sweep through the 300 to the 1 k to see if we can hear the most reverberated
sound, and see what happens if we reduce a little bit of that.
Is there anything we can do in the edit with the Q to get rid of all this reverb?
Is there anything we can do in the edit with the Q to get rid of all this ...
So I'm hearing a lot right around ... all the way starting at about 500.
Is there anything we can do in the edit with Q to get rid of all this reverb?
A lot of 700.
Is there anything we can do ...
All the way up to 1 k, so what we can do is we can actually make our width fairly open,
like a nice rounded bell shape, and cut it out from there. And now let's have a listen
if that actually helps with the reverb.
Is there anything we can do in the edit with Q to get rid of the ...
Yeah, that helps quite a bit. And you notice I reduced quite a bit of it.
Now you'll ... the other thing you could do with sweeping is, you can also sweep in reverse.
When you're sweeping in reverse, rather than listening for the worst sound, or the nastiest,
or the most annoying sound that you're trying to identify so that you can cut it out, here
in reverse we listen to what sounds the best when it's cut out.
Is there anything ...
So does it sound best when I have 700 Hz cut out? Does it sound best when I have 800 Hz
cut out?
Is there anything we can do in the edit with the Q to get rid ...
The whole idea with sweeping is to get an idea of how your particular voice sounds at
all the different frequency ranges so that you can get familiar with how to EQ it. Instead
of just haphazardly picking plug-ins and praying that it's going to sound good, and translate
well for your podcast, you actually start to learn what these frequencies sound like
on your voice.
We like to reduce right around 700, with a nice wide open Q.
And then here, we don't want to ... remember 3 k and 4 k is where speech is most recognized.
Why don't we just give it a little bit of boost in that area, but not too much, just
so that we make sure we have some clarity. And let's listen to a before and after of
our reverberated nasty track and see if this EQ helped at all.
There's without it.
Is there anything we can do in the edit with the Q to get rid ...
Here's with it.
Is there anything we can do in the edit with Q to get rid ...
Now, obviously, this is not ideal to have a voice like this, but so many times in our
podcast we have to do the best we can to correct the audio that we get, whether it be from
a remote host or whatever. But the best thing to do would be not to record in a reverberated
room to begin with. But, that's pretty cool how that can help a lot.
So there's the basic rundown on what an EQ Sweep is and what a DE-ESSER is. And now I
quickly just want to open up Adobe Audition, very quickly, and also GarageBand very quickly.
So hang with me and see how, no matter what digital audio workstation you're in, you can
apply these same effects.
Okay, so here we are in Adobe Audition, and I'm not going to do an Adobe Audition tutorial,
but I just want to show you how easy it is now that you understand the frequency range
a little bit more and you understand what you're trying to do with the DE-ESSER and
by sweeping frequencies. You can find EQ units and DE-ESSERs in no matter what digital audio
workstation you're in.
If I have the Studio Steve track here selected with the same clips that I've imported into
this session, I can come down here, onto the Studio Steve track, and I can search for a
DE-ESSER.
In Adobe Audition, you'll find that under Amplitude and Compression. And remember, a
DE-ESSER is a dynamic effect, like a compressor. And look, DE-ESSER, right here.
This is really cool, in Adobe Audition, because we actually get this visualization of our
EQ along the volume spectrum and along the EQ spectrum, which is what I love about Adobe
Audition.
But look here, center frequency, it's set to 5 k, or 5,000 Hz. We could set this to
7,000 Hz, and then this bandwidth here allows us to decide how many of the surrounding frequencies
to also apply the DE-ESSER to, so that's pretty cool. And then let's have a listen.
The salad has lettuce and tomatoes.
And there it just as a few DB gain reduction happening. If we wanted to really crunch it,
we could turn the threshold down all the way here.
The salad has lettuce and tomatoes.
And we could completely crunch those.
The seven sailors were seasick.
So we can find a nice balance-
The rose ...
-and just kill off about six DBs.
The salad has lettuce and ...
And there's are nice DE-ESSER here.
Now let's see if there's a parametric EQ where we can do some EQ sweeping on this reverb
track the same way we did in Pro Tools First.
Under filter in EQ, parametric equalizer. Cool.
And then let's have a listen to it.
And now we're recording in a room ...
Remember the first thing we did was a high pass filter. Here's our high pass filter.
Right here we have our frequency range that we can change, or just type in 80 Hz. So we
have that high pass filter happening.
And then we can create a sweep the same way by just grabbing one of these and, oh look,
Q and width. There's our Q and width to change, so we can do our own little sweep as we see
fit, as we play and listen to it. And then, we know that we didn't like 700 Hz, with a
nice open Q. And we have a very similar sounding EQ here in an Adobe Audition.
So how cool is that?
Now, let's quickly pop over into GarageBand and see if the GarageBand has the same effects
there.
Okay, so here in GarageBand, let's see if we can find the same settings.
First off, in GarageBand you'll notice that already pops up with an option for a compressor
here in EQ, and we can change some EQs here. But if you click on the EQ button here, look,
a parametric EQ.
What's the symbol right here? Yep, it's a high pass filter. If we drag the high pass
filter over, you'll notice the frequencies change at the bottom there changing, and we
can just drag it all the way up until we get 80 Hz, and now we have a nice high pass filter
there on our voice.
And then, with these EQs here, we can create the same type of a sweep. If we want the Q
to be smaller, you can come down here to where it says Q and you can drag the Q to make it
smaller or bigger with your EQs, and you can listen as you sweep.
Now let's see if we can find a DE-ESSER. To do that we just go back to the controls of
the track, and if you come down here to where it says plug-ins, and you go to plug-ins.
Right now we have a compressor on there, which isn't turned on, and we have an EQ that is
turned on.
Now let's add a new ... look, DE-ESSER. That was a recent plug-in that I use, but you can
also find it by looking under dynamics, and there's DE-ESSER, and boom. How cool is that?
Now we can just change this to 7,000 Hz like we had it and find a nice balance that we
like here with the suppression. The suppression here is going to work similar to a range or
a threshold adjustment.
And there we go Podskies, I hope you found this to be very useful. If you have any questions
or anything else you're struggling with, let me know in the comments below, or come find
us anywhere on social media at Pod Sound School. You could direct message us at Twitter or
on Instagram. Also, you can email me at studiosteve@podsoundschool.Com, with any ideas you have for future episodes
or anything you're struggling with.
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happy casting.