Compression and breath removing plugins for AA3

J

Jimi King

New member
I'm using Audition 3 for recording and editing radio voice tracks. Can anybody recommend some good compatible plugins that will add compression and take out the heavy breathing that one usually gets as a result of the compression?

I don't mind paying for a good plugin. I'm happy with AA3 though and don't wish to uograde to a newer version.
 
Unfortunately, that is the nature of the beast when using compression. It works by lowering the loud parts of the audio so that the softer parts can be boosted. Breath noise just happens to be one of the softer parts that is brought to the foreground so-to-speak.

One thing that makes the problem even worse is the recent flood of cheap Japanese mics. Many of them tend to artificially boost or exaggerate the upper-mid to high range making them sound somewhat unnatural or perhaps even harsh. Compression totally brings that out, causing a need for de-essing or EQ carving.

I cannot simply declare that your problem is with your microphone. I don't even know what you use. But it may be worth having a look at the response chart that came with the mic to learn if it has that inherent hump around 6,000 to 8,000 Hz.
 
What you would need is an expander. You would place it before the compressor in the chain. Basically, an expander turns down the quiet stuff, leaving the loud stuff above the threshold untouched. It's basically a noise gate, but it attenuates instead of shutting the signal off.

If you set the expander to turn down the breaths, then when you compress the vocal, the breath sounds will come up to their natural place. It will take some fiddling to get the settings right between the two.
 
Or use a gate.

But the real answer is to edit out the breaths. It takes all of 10 minutes to go through a 4 minute song and you aren't adding any more processing to a track than necessary.

For lead vocals, I don't completely edit the breaths, I zero in on them and lower the gain a lot, leaving just a little of the breath noticeable so it sounds natural after compression. For bgv's, I completely edit out breaths. Doesn't take very long to do.

hth,
 
Thanks for the replies. For some reason I didn't get notified that there were any so my apologies for the delay in responding. The microphone is a Neumanns TLM 107. However I am also receiving audio from other contributors and I have no idea, or for that matter control over what they are using.

I am resigned to first, adding compression and second, reducing the breaths manually. It's not a huge task because I have saved presets for these tasks, but it would be nice to find something that would automate the process. I did find some software at waves.com, but it was a little on the expensive side.

Note to chili, this is not for music. It's voice tracks over dead air for radio.
 
I just did a Google search looking for expander settings for AA3 and the first result that came up was this thread! Obviously not your everyday kind of question.
 
Did you find an expander? There really won't be an suggested or preset settings because the settings you need to use depend entirely on the audio you are sending to it and the specific result you are trying to achieve. It will be different in every situation.

Basically, you set it like a gate. You set the threshold so it triggers when someone talks. You set the hold and release time so that things don't get cut off. Then you set the attenuation control to tell it how far to turn down what doesn't trigger it. 10-20db should be enough for it to sound natural after the compressor. If not, attenuate more until you get the effect you want.
 
I was going to say why not use what came with AA. While the effects may not be "stellar" they should be able to get you where you want to go.
 
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