Hey gang,
 
I've just did an acoustic guitar in X2 that I'm super happy with performance-wise, but I'd like to go in and dial-down the finger slides that happened when my left-hand slid just a little bit.
 
Any X2 strategies for that kind of scenario?

You can try to zoom in tight and edit out the fret noise. I've done this many times with fairly good results.

While fretnoise and slides tend to be an annoyance upon critical listening, those annoyances are very much part of the character of the guitar. I would point you to Larry Carlton's acoustic rendition of "The Lord's Prayer". Stunning in it's beauty, the slides and intimate noises of the bare acoustic with no backing are a breath of fresh air. Before going thru the torment of hours and possibly days of editing stop and ask yourself, "If I remove all of the clams that make this guitar sound like a real instrument played by a real player, Am I not removing the very essence of what an acoustic guitar is and what it does?".
One of the biggest red flags in sampling is to hear an acoustic track completely devoid of all of the "Noiseiness". No finger slide noise, no fret rings, etc. As soon as you hear it you know it's fake.
Just a piece of advice from a fellow guitar player that has played and recorded for more years than he likes to admit! LOL!

The best approach is to leave them in but maybe turn them down. The good news is usually when a squeak happens nothing else is happening at the same time so it is easy to turn them down and not effect the guitar sounds either side.
 
I prefer to use an editor to do this type of thing too. It is way faster. And to Sydney some of the latest samplers and hardware synths (Kurzweil) have got all the sqeaks and sounds available so they can be added in! Voicing guitar parts on a keyboard is much more important for realism. There are some great plugins that do that too.

try cutting somewhere between 2-4k to remove some of the unwanted noise of finger noise.

All good advice. I don't know how long you've been playing or skill level but I find certain technique exercises very helpful for different things. For fret noise I would do a finger switching exercise to help cut down on the string noise.
 
Finger switching exercise:
fingers 1,2 will alternate between the 5th and 6th fret of the (E,A) (E,D) (E,G) (E,B) (E,E) strings.
fingers 2,3 will alternate between the 6th and 7th fret. Same string sequence.
Fingers 3,4  alternate between the 7th and 8th fret.
Fingers (1,3) (2,4) (1,4) same deal but with their respective frets. You can also reverse the string order any way you want. These are great to do once and a while when you notice more fret noise than you would like.

I like to leave the fret noise just as recorded.
 
I have also been experimenting with the De-esser in the VX VocalStrip - when I turn on the listen switch, all I could hear was the fret noise so it must be good reducing/removing them ?
 
Anyone using De-esser for this ?

There is also a time to remove all squeaks completely as well. I am working on a 4 song EP for a client and one of the tracks has a nice finger picking type acoustic guitar part. There were squeaks all over it. I tried reducing them various amounts and they still sounded bad no matter what we did so in the end I removed them completely and the whole track sounds way better for it.
 
Just sayin that yes it is OK to reduce them (start that way for sure) but in some instances if they are still bothering you then remove them completely. If it benefits the tune then that is right thing to do.
 
What you have to be careful of is if you are EQing the track and making it brighter and/or adding some compression these things can suddenly get ten times worse.

Jeff Evans
There is also a time to remove all squeaks completely as well. I am working on a 4 song EP for a client and one of the tracks has a nice finger picking type acoustic guitar part. There were squeaks all over it. I tried reducing them various amounts and they still sounded bad no matter what we did so in the end I removed them completely and the whole track sounds way better for it.
 
Just sayin that yes it is OK to reduce them (start that way for sure) but in some instances if they are still bothering you then remove them completely. If it benefits the tune then that is right thing to do.
 
What you have to be careful of is if you are EQing the track and making it brighter and/or adding some compression these things can suddenly get ten times worse.

its a good point.
 
On a completed mix there's really no other way to go except EQ.
setting a nice Q in the 2-4 k area and sweeping it, looking for the offender is traditionally what most people do.
but like you said if your not careful you will lose a very important part of the range, "the brilliance".
its a good way to dull a good piece of music.

Using an EQ even with a high Q setting does not work nearly as well as opening the track up in an editor. I did it all in Adobe Audition. (Cool Edit Pro) The interesting thing is the offending squeak was almost like a very sharp click and on the waveform display was an amazingly small amount of samples wide. This is where an editor kills using a plug-in. I just swiped the very very small width of a very large peak and applied an EQ that rolled off over about 3 to 4 K. The offending spike completely disappeared visually and audibly as well. The other good thing about using a LPF is the rest of the sound actually remains there so you are still hearing something. (much better than silencing it out completely too)
 
The good thing about this is after you have done this precision editing you can go back to using a nice bright EQ and compression and the sound remains clear and nice but without any squeaks present at all. Completely gone.