Listening to music is an experience. An intense emotional connection can be created between the listener and the art. For this connection to be maintained, all sonic distractions must be removed. To me, hearing mouth clicks, low frequency boominess, plosives, harshness on consonants like “ess” and “Tee” sounds, are all hallmarks of a record that hasn’t had enough attention paid to it. These sounds remove me from the emotional experience of connecting with music. When I’m mixing I get into some nitty gritty editing of the audio to remove these audio artifacts.

While I do still use de-essers, mouth de-clickers, and other plug-ins that use insert space in Pro Tools, it's best to be efficient and not go overboard. Sure, the technology is getting better and better, but every bit of processing added to audio via a plug-in has benefits and value adds as well as drawbacks and penalties to audio quality. If you are an artist or producer engineering your own music, chances are you are not listening for these degradations, let alone utilizing techniques like level matching your changes or A/B testing to see what actually sounds better. Part of being an engineer is making these cost/benefit analysis type decisions in ways that best serve the song for the sake of the audience. Here are some techniques that I use: