manual de-essing

I read this article about Jochem van der Saag mixing in the box: http://www.soundonsound.c...9/articles/it_0409.htm

He explains that he doesn't use a de-esser, but manually reduces sharp sounds. Here's a picture of one vocal track: http://www.soundonsound.c...9/images/IT_Apr_05.jpg

The white bars on the vocals track show the manual de-essing. My question is, how this was done in Cubase? It doesn't look like a volume automation, since this is seen on the track below. And more important question, how to do this kind of de-essing in Sonar X1?

Thanks.

In the article he says "The vertical white lines that are drawn directly on the vocal waveform are for de-essing." In other words: the automation lanes below the waveform are not related to the deessing, only the white lines super-imposed over the waveform.
 
I've used this process quite a lot and it is really simple to do (you don't need any special routings, side chains, or compressors). Create a track or clip volume envelope for the vocal recording you want to deess. Zoom in on an area in the waveform that contains the "ess" you want to minimize. Create a couple of volume nodes immediately before and after the "ess" sounds (be sure to include only the tiny piece of the waveform that contains the "ess". Zoom-in more if necessary.)  Create a dip in the volume envelope of a few db and listen to the vocal passage that contains the "ess". Adjust the location of the nodes and the dept of the volume dip until it sounds good to you. That's it!
 
 

There is an interesting article in the Febuary issue of Sound on Sound. It talks about editing. There is one step that is better than even applying envelopes etc to tracks and that is and I have been saying this many times now that you get yourself an editing program. I use Adobe Audition. You open tracks up one by one in this software and manually fix everything you see right there. No DAW's really contain proper editing programs and they are also nowhere as fast as a proper editing program. It does not take long to fix many problems in a track. 

Some of the best engineers say this is the ONLY way to do it. Properly. Of course you clone the original so you can always go back. So much can be done in this editing phase. Then no envelopes are required. It is much faster too. And while you are there you can bring softer vocal phrases for example up a bit and louder ones down a bit. Then the compressor you ultimately put on that track is having a relaxed time and not having to respond to things that are way out of line. You are actually fixing things before you apply any processing and as a result it all sounds better.

A bit of pre editing on individual tracks goes a long way to a much better mix later on.