What did they do back in the day before De-essers

I'm about to start modding mine.
I'm going to mod the left channel first and compare it to the right as I go.
Correction: Mine's a 546, the silver unit underneath the 565.
I might try the 546 in the side chain of an Aphex 651 Expressor and see how well it works for de-essing.

I remeber tracking it again with a diffrent mic position.... works too.

Singers worth recording.

Mics worthy or recording them.

Tape.

I maintain that the need for deEssing is brought about In large part by poor engineering...which might be simple miseducation based on leaning how to engineer vocals from Internet forums. The fix for an occasional nasty consonant is to filter it offline prior to any mix processing.

Thanks, Don. The reason I own that 565 is de-essing. It was the most affordable solution when I started recording. 

In my radio drama class we were taught to speak into a ribbon mike at an angle to avoid sibilance. Singers were taught to pass their hand in front of the mike to avoid pops and to turn away on sibilance. Neumann, Orthofon and Fairchild all made high frequency limiters for disk cutting but they needed to be part of the pre-emphasis circuit of a cutting system. We modified a Neumann to use in our mix room around 1968.

At Motown it was very unusual for singers to be closer than two feet from a mike and more often it was five. The U67 followed by the U87 ruled for lack of both sibilance and pops. Dedicated de-essers first appeared in the early '70s. In 1972 Doug Sax told me to be sure and check out the Orban for mixing my next album project.

Wow , 2-5 feet from the mic !

Nowadays 1 foot is considered far from the mic . 

I wanna try recording vocals farther back , how far back do you recommend for a condenser and a dynamic mic recording rock vocals ? Like a good starting point distance , 

Thanks for all the advice Bob !

Not Bob...(by a long shot 8), but have you ever been at some formal event where quiet was appropriate, and had a dude, whether it be your dad, brother, friend.. come up to you and try to whisper something into your ear? You know the feeling and the sound? lots of mouth noise, sibs and a the "get the frick away from me" feeling haha, well, there is a reason for that. Scum, a quiet room is a must, but try treating your mic like a person you're having a conversation with(the way most of us communicate/most of the time), sibs, mouth noise freq's do NOT travel well through atmosphere or objects, pumping them at close proximity through a mic is cool if you're singing everyone of your lovemedo tunes to your girlfriend, otherwise.....

BACK OFF!!!

So I took a tape measure and 3 feet would be the distance I'd talk to someone . Any closer and I'd really be smelling their bad breath . 

Distance comfort is a cultural trait. The study of personal distance is apply called Proxemics and the comfort zone varies not only from culture to culture but also there is a significant difference between the comfort zones between men and woman, and even still can even further vary during a woman's menstrual cycle. Microphone distance and Proxemics have an overlap but it might not be scientifically relevant or useful from the point of view of of achievement in a given situation, ie, effect one envisiona, type of microphone, song, unique singer, room,etc.
coms-group-03.blogspot.com/2011/12/intercultural-communication-of.html

The problem is that a limited, de-essed vocal hasn't nearly the "balls" of one without all of the processing.