This being the "reason in audio" forum, thought I might point out that the opening post seems to be more specific to Waves plugins than to "in the box" in general.
originally posted by GM
There was this one other way we did it once. On the Laura Turner that we did last Spring, I moved ALL of the esses from the main lead vocal track to a separate track, and i then could compress the "meat" of the vocal separately from the esses. Very time-consuming. Very elegant and infinitely controlable.
Tried this with some overblown "p"s on bass voice, with the boom eq'd off on the "p" track, but not heavily, so they're still "p"s and not some kind of clicky thing, worked nicely.
Doing "s"s or other consonants individually in Samplitude is very easy and relatively quick: customizable auto crossfade on, press a key to split a region, however small in, grab the little handle on the object for volume, or double click the new object if EQ is necessary for "p"s, etc; a box with all available built-in fx, crossfades, and available plugins, just for that new object, pops up.
Mixing a singer with a very sexy natural "ss-shh" thing going on, and IMO it would be criminal to de-ess it. Better some sibilance than reduce such a specific charm.
Strangely, my "f"s can be hairy even an arm's length from the mic. Maybe it's some kind of wino-frothing-at-the-mouth thing.
-Bobro