You could try Soundforge. I believe you could lessen or normalize the Plosive somewhat. But you will alter the sound somewhat...

Try a high pass filter.

Yea I've been high pass filtering, but this guy has such a husky voice that it really takes away from it once I get the plosives. I was hoping for a healthy dose of magic. Meh....I'll figure it out.

A good pop filter should do the trick. I like the Stedman metal one. What exactly makes your pop-filter a "crappy" one?

ALWAYS fix issues like these at the source. No band-aids (or plug-ins) will be able to replace a properly recorded track IMO. Once the mic's diaghram is bombarded with these "plosives", it will affect the overall sound (not just a sub-sonic rumble), and a simple HP filter can NOT un-do this effect.

:cool:

My pop filter was about 5 inches from the mic and the singer said he put his fist between himself and the pop screen before starting to sing. That's like 9 inches from the mic with the pop screen in between....time for a metal pop screen.

Get the metal Stedman pop filter for future vocal tracking. It was one of the best additions I made to my vocal path. Considering the heartache it saves, its worth its weight in gold!

You may also want to try just postioning the mic a little differently. (I know the guy probably moves around all over the place, but it's worth a try...)

Try to put the mic ABOVE his head, a bit above the airway coming out of his mouth, and point the mic at a slight angle down toward the nose/upper lip area. (at 6" to 1 foot away, it's not going to be terribly critical sound wise, if you're getting THAT many plosives.) You could use a tall boom and orient the mic upside-down, so that there's plenty of room out in front of him to wail away, but you'll keep the diaprhagm of the mic just an inch or so out of harm's way.

The main trick is to avoid the actual blast of air that is popping directly out of his mouth. It's amazing what an inch or two will do to eliminate that.

If you're using something of an iso booth or a separate area for vocals, you SHOULD be able to back the mic off just enough to attempt this without sacrificing too much sound.

Another odd but effective trick is to have the mic angled 90 degrees to the side, so he's singing ACROSS the membrane, not blowing directly into it. You'll still get most of the sound you want (arguably off-axis) but again, if he's that powerful a singer, it might be a minimal tradeoff to get rid of the plosives.

who knows? try it and see....

Oh, and have you tried the pencil trick yet? That might work, as well...

I started hanging my vocal mics upside down and higher than I used to. I point it on a slight angle down and let the pops and puffs fly right under the capsule. Gone. No more problems. I also posisition the pop filter so the singer thinks the mic is right in front of their mouth so they don't "aim" at the mic.

If you don't want to change the character of the sound, the thing you could do (which is very time consuming) is to manually lower the volume on each plossive.

You also probably could use some kind of multiband compression...
Find the most appearent frequency in the plossive part, set the compressor to duck at that frequency, and it should work.
Could get the undesired effect that it will react on some other sounds too.

These two choices won't take the problem away, but lessen the volume of it.

I would have two simple possible solutions to this problem using the software that I use.

First, I would consider, as MrPhil suggests, a multiband compression. The sound of the plosive should sound well above (amplitude) and outside the range (frequency) of the voice.

Second, if you can split the wave just after the plosive (like, within milliseconds), run a highpass filter and compress, then crossfade quickly to the normal sound of his voice, it would kinda be like a manual transient desinger...

Good luck!
J