Breaths on vocals remove completely or partial?

[rumlee]

What do you do, remove breaths on vocals completely or partial or just reduce volume on them?

[Elien]

Hi you,

depends on the song/genre.

Remember “Je t’aime” - Jane Birkin… etc. … no Need or use to remove breaths ;o)

Cheers, Ernst

[peakae]

I almost never remove them, it’s sounds so 80’ to me, removing the life from the performance.
But now and then it is necessary, then I do it manually using clip-gain.

[Prock]

@peakae

I almost never remove them, it’s sounds so 80’ to me, removing the life from the performance.
But now and then it is necessary, then I do it manually using clip-gain.

Same here.

Regards

[MERC476]

I usually lower them using clip gain if they’re bad. Sometimes if I have a delay on the previous word, i’ll take it out completely so it’s cleaner.

[BaseCu]

@peakae

I almost never remove them, it’s sounds so 80’ to me, removing the life from the performance.
But now and then it is necessary, then I do it manually using clip-gain.

Ditto for guitar fret noise.

[raino]

@peakae

I almost never remove them, it’s sounds so 80’ to me, removing the life from the performance.
But now and then it is necessary, then I do it manually using clip-gain.

Agree. It just makes the vocals sound unnatural. But occasionally there is one that needs to go.

[Prock]

@BaseCu

@peakae

I almost never remove them, it’s sounds so 80’ to me, removing the life from the performance.
But now and then it is necessary, then I do it manually using clip-gain.

Ditto for guitar fret noise.

Glad they didn’t remove the string squeak from the old classic Otis Redding song “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”

Regards.

[NorthWood_MediaWorks]

I’ve met a few vocalists where I’d leave the breath and silence the rest

In reality, I use fade out/in subtly in most cases, or simply use gain reduction uniformly, depending on the density of the whole passage (all the tracks at that time)

[xerix]

sometimes i use an expander or gate for the breaths.

but breaths can fit in at times for example in female vocals

[AP1]

Seems like no breaths and levelled vocals are the standard for most Pop, RnB, Rock and Country hits. They also have expensive plugins that do that.

[lukasbrooklyn]

definitely better to leave some in, though it’s horses for courses. (listen to your favourite productions for a reference.)

one thing i’d add is you may want to go through breaths, find the ‘good [sounding] ones’, and usem them to stamp over the existing ones. this is a fairly common technique in commercial productions, along with slightly shifting the breaths backwards or forwards in time to better interact with the underlying groove of the record.