Voice Over Breathing Problems

So mainly with voice over work, but it can happen with just about any musical style, you'll run into a problem where the singer/voice actor takes a loud breath. There's a couple of ways to go about fixing this. Most engineers will just throw a noise gate on the track. The problem I find in that is it can end up sounding very unnatural not hearing a person breathe as they sing or speak. The other way to correct this problem is to go into the original wave file and manually edit every breath and bring it down in volume. But that's very tedious, and I HATE tedious work.

So I figured since I'm posting little workarounds I've come up with, I'd share this one as well. Here's how it works:

• Load Waves DeBreather. It's similar to X-Noise, except it already has specific tailored noise profiles of breathing.
• Just like in the chair squeak fix, play with the Threshold and Reduction settings until you get rid of all the breaths. What you're doing right now is really no different than using a fancy noise gate.
  
• Here's the trick! Now duplicate the track, open up the Debreather plugin which should already be on the track. On the bottom right hand corner, there is an option to listen to the audio or the difference. By default it is set to audio, but select difference.
• Now you will have 2 tracks. One that has only vocals and no breaths, and one with only the sounds of the person breathing. Just lower the fader to a volume that's more natural and you've avoid spending the next 2 hours manually adjusting every breath!

Hope this helps!