Does Cubase have a feature that removes the breaths from vocal tracks
I know there are plug ins that take the breaths out of vocal tracks but someone told me that pro tools has tools included in their program that do that and suggested that Cubase probably does as well.
Does anyone know that to be true and where I can find it?
Hi,
You can use gate, to mute silent parts of the signal.
But in general, I would recommend it. The breath is part of the voice and human singer. 
Thanks I agree removing all breaths would be render the performance inhuman,. but sometimes vocal tracks can get overly breathy and too much of a contribution to the musicality of the performance
In which case for the listeners sake the humane thing to do is get rid of some of the breaths…a time consuming task if done manually.
Wave’s has a plug in that does it automatically and in all likelhood it’s probably a gate as you suggested, but dressed up as a new gadget
After attempting many techniques, I prefer to just manually go in and turn each one down a bit. A few might get cut but for breaths, I could never get a gate to work well.
I second that. In the Project Window just cut around the breath and drag the top of the part down to lower the level a bit (or use the info line). I use the same technique to initially balance the occasional extra loud or soft sections to give the compressor a more consistent input. Another similar trick is you can use the fade in on a part to tame sibilance without a de-esser.
Aloha guys,
Just to chime in on this subject.
Back-n-da-day (using 2 inch tape) the only way to effectivly do this was by using gates.
This was a hit or miss affair and many times just did not sound very good.
Even with good gear.
Then came ProTools with digital editing features/tools.
So I then started manually removing about 10—>25% of breath sounds from vox tracks.
I would keep the original track (just in case) but I would first offer the ‘breath removed’ version to the client.
For the next few years only three clients noticed or would even ask ‘what happened the the breath sound’?
A few years later I increased the amount of ‘breath sound removal’ to about 50%.
Still no complaints.
Now days I remove almost all breath sounds with a couple of notable music style exceptions.
1-Beatbox sounds.
2-Real guttural blues type sounds.
As I said, I always keep the original vox tracks just in case.
But bottom line for me is:
In all that time I feel that almost all of my clients either,
1-Can’t hear it.
2-Don’t know it.
or
3-Like it.
Just be careful when doing this and ALWAYS ALWAYS keep a back-up of the original vox track.
BTW
I have also done this type of removal on major acoustic guitar squeaks.
my 2cents
Good Luck!
{‘-’}
I have fade in and fade out offline processing setup on two shortcut keys.
You go in and blow it up large so you can see what you’re doing and highlight the end of a phrase and fade out or the beggining of a phrase and fade in. You can undo and try different sizes of selection to get what you want but it’s good for plosives and s’s at the end of words. Can be pretty transparent when done right.
I have the process silence on another key for noises between phrases.
Interesting. I bet most pitch corrected vocalists think that’s how they sound too.
Plus you can create custom fade shapes as presets. I’ve found that ramping up just a bit at the start then leveling out for about half the fade length before ramping all the way to full is very useful. Very easy to reduce or eliminate weird bits of sound.