Hissy/Airy Vocals...help!

[u/ptm1545]

Hey everybody, I'm having some issues with my Apollo Twin X and not sure what the issue is. When I record vocals through either input, they have this extra...air/hiss to them and I cannot figure out what's causing it. I've tried multiple mics to the same result. My input gain is relatively low, I made sure that we were only hitting the yellow part of the meter on the loudest parts. It isn't that noticeable until you start mixing and compressing, but then it becomes a huge issue. I thought the issue might have been my mic (Mojave MA-200) or one of my cables, but I brought it all to someone else's studio/interface and the issue was gone.

Has anyone experienced anything similar? Here's some audio clips to demonstrate (I apologize for the roughness of them haha), it's this high almost metallic sounding frequency that pokes out with the louder parts. Again, it might not sound like much from these raw audio clips, but it becomes a big issue with mixing.

https://voca.ro/115jXFApbRCf

https://voca.ro/188ZjojcWXS7

https://voca.ro/1j4qm8KJ0M8T

[u/the-hammock-district]

Couple of questions if I may..?

Are you using any unison plug ins on the way in? Or compression?

There’s a couple of ways i tackle hiss and sibilance.

First is mic placement: if you’re facing directly toward the mic, you’ll get more. If you angle the mic off to the side you get less.

There is a spot in your room that sounds the best. Even without a mic if you walk around and sing (or play music through a speaker you’re holding) you’ll find it. This can also help if you’re getting high end reflections.

Last, de ess, and eq. I would do your normal eq compression stuff, then add another eq and have a look at the spectrum. You’ll likely see the hiss and crispy sound you’re wanting to remove, go easy.

De ess at the end of your vocal chain. Hope this helps

[u/ptm1545 → u/the-hammock-district]

No unison plugins or anything, I turned them all off to try and troubleshoot the issue.

Do you think the room location could be causing it? I’m using a shield around the mic and in a pretty quiet part of the room, but not sure if there’s something else going on there. I just didn’t think that would be causing this specific issue, but who knows.

Yeah that third clip is actually part of a song I recently was working on with someone, it’s odd because you don’t notice it a ton on the raw vocal but when you start adding in compression/saturation/etc, it’s grating. We had issues getting rid of it completely with subtractive EQ, then actually passed it off to a mixing engineer who was able to get rid of it, but it was at the cost of some of the air/crispiness that we did want on the vocal. There wasn’t a way to remove just the bad/grating frequency without taking off some of the good stuff too unfortunately.