Musicians' Breathing

[tas]

We talked about breath removal before, but that was for narration. I now wanted to get opinions and best practices regarding removing or not breaths by performers in acoustic music. Yes some are simple to remove, say a flute player, but some, like a guitar player are impossible with simple editing.
Do people bother about this? If so how do you remove? Avoid when recording? (Not sure how). Use spectral noise removal? Or whatever else

[Graemme]

Renovator v2.2 here (as well as ReTouch and Rx); simple editing rarely works as well and the initial investment of time and money now pays off with quick and effective removal or reduction. I've spent most of my time using Renovator and know the GUI...I think that I could get similar results with the other two if I had as much experience with them as I do with the Algorithmix app.

Graemme

[aomahana]

Hi Tas,

This weekend I have been doing the final edits on an album. Most of the accoustic guitar tracks were part of a larger mix with other instruments. Noisy breathing or snuffling could mostly be removed with careful edits and crossfades, because they were masked by other overlapping instruments. However, one track was solo accoustic guitar, and I was expecting that we would have to either live with the distracting sounds, or re-record the track. But I decided to try Spectral Noise Reduction in Adobe Audition. Wow ....!!! Why have I waited so long to check this out? Spectral noise reduction is really suited to removing sounds like this. They are invisible when zooming into a waveform view. But once you have identified the appearance of the breath you wish to remove in the Spectral View, all subsequent examples are easy to find. When the sound is drawn around with the marquee selection tool, and removed with Auto Heal, the edit is blended into the surrounding wave. The result is like magic. It works even when the breath is concurrent and under music material. I have been using other programs less and less as I slowly (over a period of years), learn and grow to enjoy Pyramix, but IMO this feture alone is worth the purchase price of Audition.

All the best ...

[tas]

thank you both for your insights

[Perfect Record]

I'm having great luck in iZotope RX. Doing things I never imagined. You can select an area (time & freq- can even be a random shape) and adjust gain on just that selection, do a replacement or even apply EQ.

Just this morning I had to fix an obnoxious tick where the bass player would slap his ring on the finger board of a jazz bass. Wouldn't have been bad, but he was always a little off from where the drummer was playing cross stick. It took me a couple tries to figure out the best technique, but iZotope did a great job.

[Ooblecaboodle]

Do people bother about this? If so how do you remove?

As long as breath noise, or fret squeak on a guitar, or pedal noise on a piano (or etc etc etc..) is not distracting, then I prefer to just leave it in as part of the performance. Of course, being a lowly engineer, I'll often have a producer or musician who wants to remove the noise. In which case, just some judicious editing, filtering and automation is often enough.
If it's not, then I'll have to rethink how I'm recording it, or consider modifying the actual performance.
After all, my job is to get a great recording, it's the performer's job to perform it properly

[SoundKlang]

I use a directional mic positioned so that it better rejects the breathing.