[Bob Katz]

The same artist for whom I produced the YouTube master in another post in this forum came back to me today. He’s very happy with my sibilance corrections, it sounds very sweet and proper, but he does miss the high end of the acoustic guitar, which was somewhat affected. I agree, by the way….   What’s interesting is in the master that I sent to him, in the middle of the piece I removed the sibilance correction during the guitar solo since I had heard the softening of the guitar. I used M channel DE-essing, but there’s significant guitar in the middle channel, so the de-esser did affect the guitar high end.

So he asked if I minded if he de-essed the vocal on his end and sent me a new mix. I told him that we could do that, but my de-esser is very refined and my monitoring as well, plus it makes a difference to hear the sibilance in the context of the mastering processing. So I recommended that he send me two stems, vocal and instrumental. Obviously that would give me direct cleanup of the vocal without affecting the guitar. He agreed and that’s the next step. So, this is reason # 192,000 why stems may be a good idea for mastering.

• This topic was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by Bob Katz.