Just a link today, kids. You sibilant VO folk will appreciate the heck out of this. If you didn’t know what to do with a de-esser before, you darn well should know how you run one after watching. Just don’t go nuts cutting your esses, or you lose the nice air sound from the top end.

http://www.puremix.net/video/tooling/de-essers/de-esser.html

Needless to say, don’t use something unless you understand it, or your audio will suffer. 

And as a pre-emptive strike against nay-sayers and snark-a-holics, I do indeed understand that singing and spoken-word de-essing are different animals entirely, but I also know that grasping the principles of de-sucking your audio makes your free custom demos suck much less. So there, miss or mister point-out-how-everything-is-flawed.

No hyphens were harmed during the writing or posting of this blog entry. Fnord.

I missed this when it was new, so shoot me.

Thank God I have Rocketboom and Al Yankovic to help explain the brief (and not brief enough) history of Auto-Tune. 

Did you know that Auto-Tune was invented for the oil industry? Neither did I. Pretty much because I hate the effect so much that I avoided it and anything associated with it like the plague. Now, I care about it only insofar as to its eventual (dear God, please) death knell. Pfffffft.

If only the producers of Glee would learn to use it only on the cast members who need it (here’s a hint: not Lea Michele or Chris Colfer), then I know that I could watch it without gritting my teeth every three minutes, eight seconds. Even my wife hears it now. 

So to summarize: Weird Al = Funny. Auto-Tune must go the way of the Dodo. Oh yeah…Auto-Tune was invented by the oil industry, not for Cher’s career renaissance and T-Pain to have one at all. 

Auto-Tune, regardless of the origin of this saying, may you always live in interesting times.