kwpapke wrote: ↑December 14th, 2021, 12:19 pm
After a critical listen, I am embarrassed by the heavy sibilance. Too many sizzling S's. Need to do some diction exercises to calm that down.
Hi— I'm far from being an expert in this, but I have run into sibilance and plosive problems too and I have a couple of thoughts you might or might not find useful:
1. If you're not already listening with headphones at the same time as you record, do. You'll usually notice much sooner this way if you've hit a bad S or P, so that you can just take a pause and restart the current sentence instead of having to re-record later, and also (in my experience at least) getting that immediate feedback makes it a lot easier to train yourself to avoid the problem.
2. In some cases, it's possible to fix a bad S in editing and not have to re-record. If you're using Audacity, zoom in a little so you can see the waveforms in more detail as you replay that section. You'll see a very dramatic spike on the S. Select that part - the whole up-and-then-down of it - and use Effect -> Amplify, -1 dB. That's not much of a change, but then you can just keep hitting Repeat and smooshing it down further until it sounds OK. Whether you can really make it sound natural, or it ends up sounding like a slight hiccup in the word, seems to depend on the word. I haven't had any luck with this on P's though.
That’s a really interesting suggestion to try recording with headphones. It’s something I almost never do, but with my new desk recording setup it’s now a viable option. I will definitely give that a try.
Yeah, I occasionally use the de-esser built in to Audacity. It works pretty well for spot repairs, but I don’t like what it does to the sound when I use it on a whole recording.
Thanks for the ideas!!
