Review: Techivation T-De-Esser Pro

If you’ve already got your suite of plugins, a new de-esser is probably the last thing on your mind. It’s a very functional and most times, quite a boring tool. But this new company Techivation (which has a very early 2000 game company style name) aims to change the game and possibly make this seemingly boring tool interesting with the T-De-Esser Pro. 

T-De-Esser Pro isn’t only a tool for fixing audio, it’s also a creative tool for improving sound quality and giving your music a distinctive personality. It’s an enhanced version of the free T-De-Esser, and T-De-Esser Plus, which includes tools to help you make your sound not just good, but perfect!

Techivation

Spick and Span

This plugin has a slick UI design. The Techivation T-De-esser comes in 3 different versions. The free version that’s scaled-down with only the bare minimum, the plus version, which has a couple of more features and shows all the features that you could have if you get the pro. The plus version also gives an option to do a 14-day trial of the pro. The visible disabling of pro features on the plus is a little weird and new but it’s still got some great features. 

For this review, we’ll just focus on the pro version of the plugin.

A – This is the main Threshold Control. The outer circle shows signal strength and you can move the dial around to see how much the signal is exceeding the threshold mark on the dial. 

B – Output trim. Self-explanatory, nothing special. It’s mirrored on the other side by C – The Output Level and a small attenuation bar in red that shows how much the signal is being pulled down by. 

D – This allows for quick selection of the frequency range in which you want the de-esser to work. It’s basically a set of 4 preset ranges. 

E – This is where it starts to get more detailed than a regular de-esser. You have intensity, which is basically the ratio; sharpness, which determines how smoothly the de-esser kicks in and right next to that, we have attack and release. The last is a little switch to toggle lookahead. 

F – The frequency range slider lets you adjust very finely the range in which you want the de-esser to work. It goes up in the range of 0.1KHz. You can use the quick selections in section D to quickly get the range and then use the slider to really dial things in. If you’d like a little more help finding your rogue frequency, the audition feature really helps. You can either monitor just the difference or you can monitor just the filter range. The latter is quite useful to dial things in with accuracy. To the left of the audition feature, we have a quality button that is basically oversampling (that goes all the way up to 16x) and a mix slider for parallel processing which we’ll discuss a little later. 

G – The last section to take a look at. You have Stereo link, ability to change to mid/side or stereo mode, a high cut slider and a saturation slider. The saturation slider has a little button that allows you to only saturate in the filter range. 

Fully Loaded and a Bit More

Techivation repeatedly stresses how natural this de-esser sounds. After using it for a week, I can confirm. It does sound extremely natural! This is however down to the fact that you have a bit more control over this plugin compared to other de-essers. The attack and release feature makes it possible to get your de-essing to kick in and get out of action right in time.

What it also allows you to do is control how long the attenuation ‘lingers’. This alone helps with the ‘natural-ness’. Sharpness is another control that’s available and one that’s a bit harder to predict. This is one of those things that you just mess around with and leave it at a point that feels the best. In most cases, I felt myself not messing with it at all. 

The real extras on this de-esser however are the mix control and saturation. Saturation on a de-esser seems quite unnecessary and I suspect not many people are going to be using this one. It is there, however. Sometimes if you’ve gone a bit extra with the de-essing on the top end and find yourself lacking a bit of sheen, you can add some saturation in the same range to bring up some higher-order harmonics to smooth things up.

Lastly, the mix knob. This is another part of this plugin that I was trying to figure out. Having a mix feature when you have saturation does make sense. However, you can still use the mix in quite interesting ways. Parallel de-essing! You can hit the tops of snares really hard and blend in for a thickening effect. This is a feature that I suspect different people will find interesting and creative uses for.

Rolls-Royce of Sibilance Treatment

This plugin sounds great on most material. It sounds just as good whether you are using it to gently clean up a few sibilants on a vocal or taming a really harsh cymbal. The lookahead helps to make it even snappier and quicker even though in most cases you’ll find the stock setting to be responsive enough.

As far as de-essers go, it is right up there with all the best ones. The free versions are good enough by themselves, but if you are someone looking for a de-esser that’s armed to the teeth with controls, the pro version will not disappoint. The only de-esser that comes close if not exceeds in the amount of control you have is Essence by DMG. But Essence is also quite complicated and difficult to use owing to its UI.

The built-in oversampling makes the plugin sound good even at higher reduction ratios and sharper transient material, the acid test for de-essers. I particularly understood the importance of oversampling for dynamic suppression use-cases while using Oeksound’s Soothe and Spiff. It makes all the difference between a buttery smooth result and a grainy, rough-around-the-transient-edges result.

Find out more about T-De-Esser-Pro