DE-ESSER

I once had the pleasure of downing some beer and peanuts with a crusty old recording engineer — let’s call him ‘Fred’ — who in the 1980s was employed by one of the top studios in Melbourne. Fred used to work with advertising customers, creating soundtracks for television and radio commercials, and he told me the following story…

In jeans and a t-shirt, pony-tailed Fred was in the control room doing mix passes and balancing the main character’s voice in an advertisement. Sitting next to him — sporting a suit, tie and cuff-links — was a clipboard-wielding executive from the ad agency. The two weren’t exactly candidates for a bromance. The ad guy figured Fred for an insect-harbouring, scruffy hippie, and Fred thought the ad guy was a craven weasel who would sell his own grandmother to turn a profit. So Fred gets the mix just about right and asks, “How’s that?” The ad guy responds, “Sounds a bit ‘essy’!”

Now, at that particular moment in history the physical number of de-essers in Australia was precisely zero. Fred’s thinking was that the ad guy had picked up an industry magazine and read about some American engineer using one, and was simply seizing the opportunity to be a smart arse. “Do you have a de-esser?” He queries. After a pause, Fred says, “Yes, we do, but it’s in use elsewhere. How about I bring it in tomorrow and we’ll finish off?” Ok...

That night Fred goes home, grabs a two-unit rack spacer panel from a box in his garage, and about an hour later it