VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Ed Fisher]

I have gotten into the habit of either lowering every breath in my audio productions to where they are either imperceptible or close to it....OR completely chopping them out (if there is enough space for it to feel "natural")

But then I just listened to some DEMOS of folks here (whom I shall not name) who seem to be keeping very busy...yet in their DEMO Productions they make no attempt to remove them at all. And honestly, in the Old Radio Days, it would never have occurred to me. (of course that was during the razor blade days)

So...is removing breaths necessary?

Have I become unnecessarily anal about this?

Do producers hear you "breathing" and conclude that you are not a professional?

It would sure save a lot of time to simply forgo this in the future.

I'm holding my breath...waiting to hear what you think.

http://youtu.be/OMOGaugKpzs
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"I reserve the right to be completely wrong."

[Jeffrey Kafer]

I've found that for commercials, removing breaths is a good way to shave some time to make it fit better.

In long form like audiobooks, I don't touch them.
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Jeff
http://JeffreyKafer.com
Voice-overload Web comic: http://voice-overload.com

[Bob Bergen]

I never remove breaths. Takes the humanity out of the performance and makes it too mechanical.

[cyclometh]

I remove breaths from explainer narrations, commercials and the like. I don't for audiobooks, but I have worked very hard, especially over my last few books, at developing my mic and recording technique to make my breaths less prominent. I've had trouble at times with too much of it.
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Corey "Vox Man" Snow
http://voxman.net

[Charles Nove]

I hate listening to audio that's been excessively de-breathed. I start to feel uneasy, wondering if the voice is about to suffocate.
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Charles Nove
Scottish voice-artist, to the world ... and beyond!

www.charlesnove.com

[Bill Campbell]

When producing, as opposed to just voicing, I always remove breaths, but I leave the space where they would be if timing allows, like on commercials.

If your compressing the voice, you can just reduce the level of the breath, say -7db, before compressing. Loud breaths, compressed, can sound worse than no breath at all.

For narration and audio books, leaving them in can sound more real, and hopefully your not compressing much for those projects.
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www.asapaudio.com

[Lee Gordon]

I have found that many people tend to write excessively long sentences and there's no way for me to get through them without coming up for air. When I go back through the VO, I remove any breaths that occur where a breath doesn't necessarily belong, I lower the volume of any breaths that seem overly loud, and I shorten ones that seem too long. But I always listen to make sure that whatever I did sounds natural.
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Lee Gordon, O.A.V.
Voice President of the United States
www.leegordonproductions.com
Twitter: @LeeGordonVoice

[bransom]

For commercials, I pretty much take them all out unless it's a real story-teller kind of spot and the breath fits. For long form stuff like corporate narrations, the bulk of my work, I take out the breaths at the beginning of a sentence and then lower the volume of the mid-sentence breaths. Unless, as Lee noted, the sentences are excessively long and overwritten corporate speak complete with run-on sentences with so many words that you'd have to have the breath of fifty people to get through them without taking a breath and where taking a breath would sound out of place because it's such a long run-on sentence and the copywriter couldn't be bothered to use commas or break the sentences up into discreet thoughts but instead just strung them all together into single massive sentences because they flunked middle school English and really aren't writers at all. You know. Like that.
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Bob Ransom
"I really need a pithy quote here."

[Mike Harrison]

Next to voice-over, another passion of mine is making voice recordings that sound as natural as possible. Especially for educational material, my feeling is that it is the subject matter that should receive all the attention, not the narrator. If there is anything at all about the narration that distracts the listener (and, as the narrator, it will continue to be a distraction), any engagement is now broken.

The sound of inhalation in a good voice recording doesn't bother me at all. If the sound of a particular breath is too pronounced by mistake, I fix it. But a lot of breath noise is made louder by the use of compression. I personally do not like listening to overly compressed audio. It's done for a reason (yet to excess) in broadcasting, but the overuse of compression makes for very bad voice recordings in that they are not natural sounding.

If we have a recording of unnecessarily compressed speech with all the breaths removed (regardless of whether space is left) this, in my opinion, is not a very attractive listen.

One other factor that definitely exacerbates the sound of breaths (as well as mouth clicks & sinus pops): speaking too closely to the mic.

I really think a lot of the breath issues folks experience are due to the overuse (or misuse) of compression and speaking too closely to the mic.

Compression is similar to a magnifying glass: it can make everything 'BIG.' But it makes EVERY thing big.
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[Scott Pollak]

Interestingly I actually copied and pasted a breath into one of my recordings yesterday. There was a space between sentences that NEEDED a breath. Yeah, seriously. With just 'dead space' there, it sounded odd. Once I added in the copied breath, it sounded very natural.

On the flip side, something that horribly exacerbates breath sounds is if you use dynamics processing or compression. The stuff we read and submit to Umano goes through some sort of processing and I occasionally read feedback people leave on other narrators about the huge breaths sometimes being very distracting. I've been lucky to dodge that bullet so far. But listening to their complaints, it seems whatever processing Umano adds to the final uploaded recordings really makes the breaths pop, as if going through a flange effect.
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Scott R. Pollak
Clients include Pandora, NPR Atlanta, Wells Fargo, Cisco, Humana, Publix, UPS, AT&T, HP, Xerox and more.

www.voicebyscott.com

[Jason Huggins]

I often add a flange to my breaths. On some planets, that is actually very natural sounding. I haven't figured out how to get it sound natural in software yet though. Just gotta record it raw.

[jsgilbert]

The problem I find is that most voice talent, in addition to not really being adept as voice talent, don't really understand editing, acoustics, etc. 2,387 of you that routinely "produce" commercials and not a word about CALM?

Sadly, it seems that VO 2.0 demands the voice talent be a Swiss army knife. The good news is that the bar continues to be lowered and it's just a matter of time before invertebrates will be able to do v.o.

If you're listening to something that has been debreathed and it doesn't sound natural, then it means whoever edited it didn't do it very well.

There is a nice balance one can reach. In the past it was left to well trained and experienced audio editors. Today, it's more like GIGO (garbage in - garbage out)

I tend to hang out with producers, directors, great engineers, etc., because I find I learn more from them than I do from most voice talent and/or "coaches".

Notice the word "most".
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j.s. gilbert

js@jsgilbert.com
www.jsgilbert.com

"today is the first day of the rest of the week"

[Ed Fisher]

The ‘Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation’ act or...

The CALM Act

http://www.procommvoices.com/wordpress/the-calm-act-what-you-need-to-know

http://www.qualisaudio.com/calm_act_loudness.htm
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"I reserve the right to be completely wrong."

[Quicksilver]

Cutter Ash, you inspired me to write a blog on the topic, thank you!

http://drewcarpentervo.com/the-blog/

For future reference, is it bad form to provide a link to my blog? Would it be better if I copied and pasted the blog post here? Not sure, apologies if I guessed wrong.

[Lee Gordon]

If the Calm Act is enforced as stringently as the Do Not Call List, I wouldn't throw those earplugs away just yet.
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Lee Gordon, O.A.V.
Voice President of the United States
www.leegordonproductions.com
Twitter: @LeeGordonVoice