In the video, I jokingly call Hiss “The Soothe Killer”.
That is obviously not entirely fair. Soothe is a great plugin, and it does many things Hiss is not trying to do.
But when the job is specifically to find and control a few unpleasant resonances, such as sharp vocal sibilance, harsh cymbal tones, or an aggressive frequency that keeps jumping out of a mix, I often find Hiss much easier to dial in.
Hiss started with a mastering job.
A few months ago, I received a really good mix that had one frustrating problem: the S sounds were too sharp. The mix itself was great, but the vocal sibilance kept poking through in a way that was difficult to ignore.
I tried pretty much everything I had available. That is quite a lot of tools: de-essers, de-harshers, dynamic EQs, resonance suppressors, spectral processors, and the usual suspects such as Soothe, Gullfoss, and similar plugins.
None of them quite did what I wanted.
The problem was not that I wanted to remove the whole S sound, or simply turn down a broad high-frequency area. I wanted to get rid of the worst resonances while keeping the noise component of the sound intact. The noise was part of the vocal character. It was the sharp tonal spikes inside it that needed to go.
So I made a small tool for that specific job.
The first version of Hiss solved the problem immediately. It could identify the harsh resonances inside the sibilance and let me turn those down without flattening or dulling the whole sound. At that point, I realised there was probably a proper plugin hiding in there.
That original version only worked in the upper frequencies. Since then, Hiss has grown into something much more flexible. It now works across the full audible range, from 20 Hz to 20 kHz.
Resonances, noise, and everything in between
Hiss is a spectral processor that listens inside a frequency range you define and finds between 1 and 20 resonances.
It then separates what it hears into three components:
Tonal: the resonance or resonances Hiss has found.
Noise: the noisy component around those resonances.
Rest: everything else that is neither part of the selected resonances nor the noise component.
The Tonal and Noise components each have their own gain control, ranging from -48 dB to +24 dB.
This means that Hiss is not just a resonance suppressor. You can reduce resonances, reduce noise, reduce both, or even exaggerate either component when that is useful.
An S sound, for example, is not always harsh for the same reason. Sometimes there is a sharp tonal resonance that needs to come down. Sometimes it is mostly noise. Often, it is both.
Hiss lets you treat those parts separately, which can make de-essing and de-harsh processing much more transparent.
Instead of treating a whole frequency area as one problem, you can get much closer to the part of the sound that is actually causing it.
Detection
Set the frequency range, choose how many resonances Hiss should look for, and adjust the Threshold to decide when it should react.
The detector can listen to:
The filtered dry signal
The selected Tonal component
The Noise component
The Rest component
This gives you a lot of control over what actually triggers the processing.
For example, you may want Hiss to react only when a tonal resonance gets too strong, while leaving the noisier part of the signal alone. Or you may want to use the noise itself as the trigger, then reduce just that component.
There is also an A button next to Threshold.
Depending on which detection source you choose, the incoming detector signal can sometimes be too strong or too weak for the Threshold range to be immediately useful. This is especially common when using the isolated Tonal or Noise components as the source.
Pressing A automatically adjusts the detector level to a more sensible working range, making it easier to set a useful Threshold without having to fight an input signal that sits outside the scale.
More than a de-esser
Hiss is useful for vocals, cymbals, distorted guitars, sharp synths, acoustic instruments with unpleasant ringing, and anything else where you need to pinpoint what is actually making a sound difficult.
It can work as a very precise de-esser, but it is not limited to that.
You can use it anywhere in the spectrum, from low-end resonances and boxiness to sharp upper-midrange buildup, brittle cymbals, or vocal sibilance. It can also be used creatively to bring forward resonance, expose noise textures, or reshape the internal balance of a sound in ways that are difficult to reach with normal EQ or dynamic processing.
Hiss is a focused tool for a focused problem: finding the exact part of a sound that is too resonant, too noisy, or simply too harsh, then letting you deal with it without unnecessarily changing everything around it.
Formats:Mac - VST3 & AUWin - VST3
Demo version:
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