Music Lesson: Dealing with Plosives and Breath Management

Okay, so we just saw how to deal with plosives.

Step 1: Muting and Preparing

Let me mute that and get the breaths. You can see that's another hidden track I've got here. This comes from the track that you'll be using for your third challenge, where you're going to be mixing it.

Quick Listen

Let's give it a quick listen:
So you say that it's fine just to wear sunny life that your mama should have taught you so much better.

Step 2: Cleaning Up Vocals

So we're going to clean this up a little bit. When we start processing vocals, one of the common things we will do is to add compression.

Important Note on Compression:

• People often say that it makes things louder.
• In fact, it does the opposite. It makes things quieter or makes the loud things closer in level to the quiet things.
• What you usually do is push everything up.

Breath Management

In this case, where the loud bits and quiet bits are much closer together in level, the breaths will then become far more prominent.

I'll start off by looking at the larger sections, such as between here and here.

• There are some breaths in here, but I can probably get away with just deleting that.
• I might put a little bit of a fade out here, maybe a micro fade at the beginning so it's not going to click too badly.

Great, that's cleaned that up fairly quickly.

Step 3: Processing Breaths

Now, I could go ahead and do the same with the breaths between sentences and words. So if I were to actually just delete this and put some fades on it...

Note on Fades:

• Oops, not a cross fade. Just want to fade in and fade out.
• Okay, the fade-in is wrong.

Listening Check:
Let's have a listen with this. That's my...
It sounds a little bit lifeless. It sounds artificial. You can hear that it's been chopped up.

Sometimes, it's even worse than this. This isn't actually too bad as recordings go, but I don't want to totally remove that breath.

Why Breaths Matter:
One of the things that makes breaths such a thick sound is they have around about 500Hz or so added to them.

I could bring in an EQ and automate it to cut in on these sections, but I find a much easier solution to this: Track Splitting.

Step 4: Creating a New Track for Breaths

I'm going to create a new mono audio track. In fact, if I right-click on here and choose duplicate, turning off the active and alternative playlists, I will get a new track that's exactly the same as the previous one.

• This will bring any plugins and everything along with it.
• I will name this track "Breaths."

Making Selections

I can now make my selection over the breath.

• Not quite there. That's a little bit better.
• I need to bring this down to the track that's underneath.

Step 5: Using Shortcuts

Now, this is where your shortcuts really come in.

• I've made a selection.
• I can transfer that selection up and down to different tracks.

Remember earlier I showed you could do this by clicking on track names?

Keyboard Shortcuts:

• P to go up.
• Semicolon (;) to go down.

Steps to Cut and Paste:

1. I'm going to go to here.
2. I'll press X for cut,
3. then semicolon (;) to go down,
4. and V to bring this back up again.

That's now taken the breath and brought it onto the track underneath.

Repeating the Process

There are a few more of these. Let's have a listen.
That'll do.

• X, semicolon, V.
• Here's another one.

Pro Tip:
One trick I tend to use if I've got a lot of this kind of work is to use a programmable mouse with macro keys.

• I can set all of the buttons to streamline this process.
• I just press the button on my mouse, and it reels out that sequence of commands.

Final Adjustments

So it's a really quick and easy way to remove the breath. Rather than just sitting there typing, let's hit the macro key. Done!

You can go through the full track later in your mix exercise.

Next Steps:
At the moment, this is going to sound exactly the same, but I could now apply compression to this track without affecting the breaths.

Earlier, I mentioned that thickness at around 500 Hz. Let's go to my mix window and look at how to do effects in more detail in the next sessions.

EQ Settings

• I'll go for the seven-band filter at about 500 Hz.
• Pull that down to take a lot of the body out of those breaths.

Let's go back to the edit window and hear it before.

Final Thoughts:
We could probably get away with a little bit more. We could even pull down the level a touch.

We're able to leave the breaths in the mix but without making them too prominent. Just separating them into another track is a really nice way to treat them independently and avoid side effects.

This is just a little trick for you.

Upcoming Session

In the next video, I'll show you how to comp your takes together. This is a particularly important one to pay attention to because your challenge for this session is a track comping exercise.

These are the two tricks I've just showed you. This is something just to bring into your own production.

Okay, see you in a bit!