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What's your go-to De-esser plug?

The stock DP plug.

DP's de-esser is amazing.

The dynamic EQ is fantastic for it as well.

Yup, DP's De-Esser, and Dynamic EQ.

I've also used WaveArts Multidynamics for a long time- but when DP's above plugs came out, I use WA-MD for other important tasks (like NR).

I like DP's a lot. WAVES' RDeEsser isn't bad, either.

Waves and DP here. However, last week I picked up the Fabfilter Pro-DS on sale, so I will be adding that to the mix.

The one from Eiosis, which thankfully got ported to 64-bits finally, quite recently.

MOTU's is great, but I haven't had a chance to learn it deeply enough to use it in place of ones I know well. I did some evaluation of it when it came out and was quite impressed.

The quad de-esser from IK is quite useful for some things. I'd have to search project notes (later) to find what it was that I found it was especially good at doing without artifacts.

I find the Sonnox de-esser to be great for guitars, of all things. It helps de-harsh poorly recorded guitar amps -- unfortunately a situation I often have to deal with when guitarists decide to fly in their tracks vs. have me record them.

I always found the one from Eiosis to be the best for hi-hat and other cymbal tracks. My recollection is that MOTU's also excels in this role.

For vocals, I rarely de-ess if I recorded them myself, as I know how to avoid that at the outset. But when I dig up older tracks, or ones recorded by others, Eiosis is probably the most flexible and natural due to its unique "forked engine" that does parallel processing to avoid artifacts and to better distinguish transients from sibilance.

Nectar is very good if I need something to drop in.

Otherwise, DP's or a dynamic eq.

I just checked my project notes from the last metal album I produced, and it was the hi-hat and ride cymbal where I used IK Multimedia's de-esser plug-in for de-harshing.

This was before Eiosis E2Deesser had been ported to 64 bits yet, and before I bought 32 Lives, so I haven't yet had a chance to compare the two head-on.

mhschmieder wrote:This was before Eiosis E2Deesser had been ported to 64 bits yet, and before I bought 32 Lives, so I haven't yet had a chance to compare the two head-on.

I need to watch a couple more tutorial videos to let the Eiosis De-Esser sink in- yow! It's not yo daddy's De-Esser.

iZotope Alloy is quite good to my ears.

Oh, I should add a caveat that I haven't used the new version of Eiosis yet as I haven't been doing that type of work lately (but will soon).

I hope it has the same rich feature set as the original. And that one was VERY complex, but I was able to set up some good starting point templates, and the presets were actually pretty good for some starting points as well.

Izotope Nectar, or the Waves.

Actually, for vocals, Nectar can be a good placeholder for quickie "early production" runs -- especially the revised version.

I sometimes use it in that role, and then break it out to individual plugs during real production.

It never occurred to me to try the de-esser part of Nectar on instruments.

Like I said, I mostly de-ess harsh guitars, and spot mics on top kit.