Removing plosives (S's & p's)

HI all does Cubase have a tool that removes plosives? I recorded some vocals and forgot to use a pop shield.

The only way i know of is to zoom into the wave form with a resolution lower than 1 and use the draw tool to manually reduce the volume of the plosives, or just reduce the volume of the plosives by highlighting the plosives and bringing the volume down.

is there a better way to do this?

Im using Cubase 12 pro.

A de-esser (Cubase [Pro] comes with one) can help with the S’s. You might also want to look into the envelope shaper (another plug in that comes with Cubase) to catch some of the transients of (P’s and T’s). Plug-ins like that can usually get you most of the way there, but you might have to manually edit some particularly difficult ones to get the best result.

I have the de-esser on my vocal chain, and it usually works well enough during the mixing phase, and I resort to manual edits towards the end of the production work when everything else is dialed in so that I don’t waste manual effort on something that might be cut later on.

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Thanks for the reply.

I use De-essers on all of my vocal chains, i never usually have plosive issues to behin with, i usually only have to use the desser to smoothen out the transients a bit &take some edge off because i use a very bright rode mic. My mic & pop shield combo is usually so good i never have to manually edit the plosives, just de-ess a lil. Its been YEARS since ive had to do that so i was hoping there was a tool for extreme plosive cases that actually processes the audio :laughing:

but youre right, de-essers are made to reduce p’s and s’s. so what you’re saying does make sense, maybe ill have to go push the de-esser harder and the boost some of the high frequencies after. . The envelope idea sounds promising, ive not thought of that before, so ill give that a try! If all else fails i just re-record with a pop shield.

edit –

Mixing With Mike Mixing Tip: How to De-Plosive a Vocal - YouTube this seems like a good way to do it without a de-esser using waves c1 sidechain band comp with split mode rather than wide mode. which seems more suitable for my issue & I can trigger the specific frequencies with side chain. I find cubases de-esser questionable

In Melodyne (which is what I use for this stuff) there is a control to reduce the sibilance of the audio itself. This seems like the kind of thing that might also be in Spectral Layers One. I don’t know if it is, but it is probably worth it to take a look & see. Also there is a Greg Ondo video that shows how to automate most of the task when manually reducing levels where you just select the range, hit a key command and the reduction occurs.

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Given that you c12pro, you also have Spectralayers One. I would generally opt to remove them using a spectral editor if I find I can’t just duck the volume well enough. I’m positive you could get some really great results by ducking just the right frequencies in spectralayers.

Edit: ducking the right frequencies, not sucking. :rofl:

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Thank you i’ll give this a go. I havent used Spectralayers before but have been meaning to so this gives me a reason :smiley:

marked this as the solution. I did think Cubase had something specifically for my issue. & SpectraLayers is that 110%! :slightly_smiling_face:

De-esser’s are okay with vocals that aren’t stupidly problematic. but issues arise when u have P, T, S and sh etc… problems. they all have diff frequencies. SpectraLayers gives me freedom to adjust frequencies independent of one another & adds 3D visuals to the mix. so its perfect

Cubase SpectraLayers One - How to fix audio! - YouTubehere a video for those who also want to use SpectraLayers to remove vocal plosives (specifically SpectraLayers One)
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Mixing With Mike Mixing Tip: How to De-Plosive a Vocal - YouTube - I also had success with this video by the legendary Michael White. He creatively uses a band comp with the same fundamentals as a de-esser to reduce plosives. in the video he focuses on low end plosives, but in the comment section he said this about midrange/higher frequencies: “There are no perfect solutions post recording but something like this can do much of the heavy lifting. One way is to raise the frequency of the Low Frequency Cutoff so that it captures more of the low mids when it compresses. Sometimes this will make it affect other non plosive words. In which case feed a pre filtered vocal into a bus that feeds the sidechain of the C1 so that only the real sub freqs trigger the compression. Then you can raise the frequency of the crossover and control that part of the plosive”

thanks all :grin:

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I’ve never liked them or the results from them. Even the capability to edit the levels manually was a huge improvement. The tools we have now are kind of amazing.

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I’ve found the Frequency EQ used in its dynamic mode quite useful at times for dealing with such vocal issues. With 8 bands it offers quite a lot of flexibility.

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Greg Ondo, long ago when explaining either Logical Editor or macros, created a macro that works quite well with S and P’s. Hopefully someone else can provide a link?

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