Pre-fx envelope for vocal track: manual de-essing and volume control at same time?

[ADesroches]

Hi,

This is my very first post. Before I ask my question, I just want to express my gratitude to the Reaper team and all the Reaper users out there who have posted helpful information on this forum and elsewhere. I've been using Reaper for close to a year now, with great results, in that is in large part thanks to those who have taken their time to share their knowledge and expertise online. Reaper is awesome, and so is the Reaper community.

Now, my question relates to two vocal processing techniques shown in Kenny Gioia Youtube videos: "Vocal Dynamic Processing in Reaper", and "De-essing vocals in Reaper".

In the first video, Kenny shows how to make the volume of a vocal track more even by creating a volume pre-fx envelope and making adjusments. Tried it and it works great! A bit tedious but worth it.

In the de-essing video, he uses the same volume pre-fx envelope for manual de-essing. Also works great, and worth the effort in my opinion.

My question is: if you plan to use a pre-fx envelope to make the volume of a vocal track more even before other processing stages (compression etc.), and you also plan to do manual de-essing of that same track, do you do both things at the same time in the same pre-fx envelope? That is what I assume, as I can't think of another way to do it, but I was hoping others could confirm.


Thanks

[ashcat_lt]

There's no reason you can't. It's often true, though, that you kind of don't realize that you need de-essing until you've got a little further along and started to add other processing. EQ and compression can take something that didn't sound like a problem and make it rip your head off pretty quick. So then you go back and tweak the envelope some more.

[ADesroches]

That's good advice ashcat, thank you.

Since I'm in the envelope anyway early in the processing stage to make the volume more even, may as well do a first round of de-sessing. I can always go back to it later after comp, eq etc., for another round of de-essing.

Cheers

[nicholas]

An alternative to using the envelope for all your de-essing (if there aren't a ridiculous number) is to split the item in the middle of the "sss" sound, and use the fades at tthe end and start of each item. That would leave you free to use the pre-fx volume envelope for other purposes.

I'd suggest as an experiment to try this and see if it works for you.

[ADesroches]

Thank you nicholas, I'll try that as well. For this to work though, I'll need to figure out how I can split a track exactly where I want to. Right now, I can only split a track in a spot that is linked to the song's tempo, even when I zoom in as much as I can. I'm sure there is a way, I'll look into it.