People Breathing Heavy When Not Speaking

Some people are heavy breathers in general, and others APPEAR to be heavy breathers because of the proximity of their microphone to their mouth.

If someone is wearing a headset (not earbuds, an actual headset) and the mic is situated under their nose, it will pick up a lot of breath sound. It’s best, during soundcheck before recording, to ask them to move the mic to a position that doesn’t pick up their breaths as much.

Dealing with these types of breathing sounds after they’ve been recorded is not difficult, but it may take quite a bit of time to clean things up.

A few thoughts:

• Deleting/silencing their breaths when they’re not speaking is usually the best way to clean up their track.
• Using a gate will not usually work well. Because if the breaths are loud they will open the gate and get through, and if you set the threshold higher so the breathing doesn’t trigger the gate then the gate will start cutting off the beginnings of words, etc.
• Be careful using Auphonic’s leveling and gating features together, as it can sometimes amplify erroneous noises, including breathing sounds.

As always, it’s better to avoid a problem than have to fix it later 😉

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