I'm trying to get a little more sophisticated in my mixing. On my current "work-in-progress" song, I noticed several excessive "ess" sounds (on words like "miss", "sure", etc.). I knew about the "compressor side-chain" de-essing method, but wondered about other methods. By googling, I came across a very good article in Sound On Sound mag @
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may09/articles/deessing.htm.
Their alternate method is to
move the "ess" sounds from the main vocal track to a secondary vocal track and then reduce the volume of the secondary track. I tried it and it works great! Very easy to do with the AW16G or AW1600 (and probably the other Yammy AWs). Just use the TRACK-VIEW-WAVE screen to find the start and end points of the "ess" sound and transfer them to the EDIT-MOVE Start/Stop/To points. I set the secondary "ess" track to about 6 dB lower volume than the main vocal and it does a very nice job of reducing the sibilance.
Obviously, this technique is easier to implement on a software DAW with the ability to draw "volume envelopes" and decrease the volume of the vocal track in the "ess" areas. I've often wished the AWs had some rudimentary, region oriented volume editing capability, but alas, they don't.
Before finding this method, I tried the "compressor side-chain" method, but didn't have a lot of luck. However, I found that this "secondary track" method appears to work very reliably.
Try it and maybe you'll like it, too. Or, maybe you already knew about it.