De-esser in Ableton Live

Have you ever recorded the perfect vocal track, only to find the “S” sounds are just too loud?

A lot of air is required to create the “S” sound. Microphones, especially condensers, can capture that air and really exaggerate the “S” sounds. This can make an excellent vocal performance irritating. To fix this, producers turn to the De-Esser.

Ableton Live doesn’t come a dedicated De-essing plugin, but the compressor is built to handle the job. In order to de-ess, we need to find the frequencies of the “S” sounds (usually anywhere from 2-10kHz). Then we need to set the compressor to react only to those frequencies. In other words, the compressor only turns on when the “S” sounds occur.