Breath Control: When and how to use it

Let’s see why breaths could be annoying when processing a voice recording...

A common problem in voice & vocal recordings is usually the breath of the speaker or singer between the phrases or lyrics respectively.

Moving on to the post-production stage, it’s very likely that you will need to apply an amount of dynamic processing, equalization, leveling, etc. on your recording. In this case, it’s expected that the level of these unwanted breaths will increase along with the voice, leading to a pretty annoying result!

If I enable Breath Control, will it remove the breaths completely?

Similarly, when using ERA Voice Leveler to correct your recording levels, expect the level of the breaths to increase as well. Although there are breath removal tools around, they usually need much time to edit or remove the breaths without making the recording sound unnatural.

For this reason, we added the Breath Control module. Breath Control will not remove breaths, but it won’t process them the same way as the useful signal either, leading to a smoother and more balanced result.

Breath Control Example        

In order to describe better the Breath Control module, we are going to use an example. We processed a voice recording with and without Breath Control enabled and we compared them.

So, here we have a sample of the original recording unprocessed. As you can see, it is a low level recording with level inconsistencies between the phrases. Also, there is a long breath between the two phrases.

We used ERA Voice Leveler to make the recording louder and balanced, without enabling the Breath Control. As expected, the breath got louder too.

Although the result didn’t sound bad, we wanted to even the breath part out a little bit. So, here it’s the same sample with the same amount of processing but this time Breath Control was enabled.

As you will notice from the image, the breath level stayed at a low level (compared to the first image) and of course sounded smoother.