ESSPLIT

In my years of mixing I have chosen and used a lot of de-essers. What I have come to believe is that setting the level by hand, one sound at a time, still gives the best result. "Hmm, this one is over-processed" — "that ess is still harsh" — while you sit there nudging a threshold, you could have ridden clip gain through the whole take and been done. And this way of working will never go out of date: whatever comes along next, nothing will sound more like what you intended. The catch is that editing a waveform that finely takes a bit of work. So I built something to help with that part — so that the work comes out better.

ESSPLIT is an AudioSuite plug-in for Pro Tools. It detects esses and breaths in a vocal or dialogue selection and cuts the original clip at exactly those points. Each one becomes a clip of its own, ready for you to set its level.

Nothing is rendered and nothing is replaced. The split is an ordinary, non-destructive clip separation: the same audio, the same track, just cut where a careful editor would have cut it. What used to be an hour of zooming and slicing is one button.

There is a word we engineers are fond of: reversible. Select what ESSPLIT cut and press ⌘H — Heal Separation — and it is one clip again. No new audio files are created.

A de-esser decides for you, the same way for every syllable. Clip gain doesn't: this ess down 3 dB, that one untouched, this breath halved, that one gone. ESSPLIT doesn't touch the sound at all. It does the finding, and leaves the judgement where it belongs.