Every Breath You Take (Out): Should You De-Breath Your Audio?

You are any her three story Welcome, Hi the Pro Audio Suite. Thanks you guys, a professional and motivated. With Chex the Vido stars George Wisom, founder of Source Element, Robert Marshall, International Audio Engineer Darren, Robbo Roberts and Global Voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Tribooth, Austrian Audio Making Passion, her Sauce Elements, George the Tech Wisdom and Robbo and Aps International Demo. To find out more about us, check the Pro Audio Suite dot com. And welcome to another pro audio suite thanks to Austrian Audio Making Passion heard and we'll be hearing more from auster and Audio and the coming weeks with their new c C eight super cardioid which George actually has right in front of him as we speak. And of course Trybooth. Don't you get the code t ri I p AP two hundred that will get you two hundred US dollars off your try booth. But today we're not focusing on the Austrian Audio c C eight SC We're talking about debreathing. Should you. I've got a funny feeling I know where this is going to go. And one person in particular who will say I don't like debreathing. Well, this subject was actually inspired just to set this up. This is more the conversation than sort of should you debreath or not? This was actually inspired by some people will know Toby Ricketts, who's a voiceover guy here in New Zealand and Australia, really well known one, and he actually put up a blog a week or two ago and he called it Unseen Punctuation How breath control engages ear drums, And what he sort of talked about was how you can use breaths as sort of like an emotional cue or a punctuator or something like that, and then if you automatically just go in and pull them out, then you're actually sort of kind of destroying some of the part of the read you know what I mean, or something that the voice actor might have intentionally put in as part of the reed. So he was sort of saying, you know, rather than just a blanket yes, id breath everything, should it be more of a controlled thing, you know, use it more as as when it's needed and leave it alone when it's not, which is, to be honest, kind of my philosophy. Well, it's interesting because look, I know what he's saying. And there are things if you're telling a story or it's an audio book or something like that kind of form, sure leave them in. If it's a thirty second commercial, get them out because you're going to have to anyway to make it fit in the thirty But I kind of get the emotional side of if you're doing narrating a film or a documentary or audiobook or anything like that, a story, then yeah, sure. And there's also just lowering the volume of breath sometimes because a lot of the times you're just so close to the mic and it's out of scale, you know, out of perspective, and it does humanize it. And if it's a character, you can keep the breath in, but there's definitely times when you at least want to lower it. I mean, I'm sure whoever deals with Donald Trump's ideo does a lot of this. Here. Let you just stop him breathing, it would be that would be a plus. I mean, my example of this would be I actually had to do a commercial the other day which was you know, sort of like a person on the street, and you know, it was a radio commercial, but if it had been a TV commercial that was supposed to be this person standing on a street corner spooking X product. And it occurred to me when I was thinking about sort of doing this topic for the show this week, then, is like, if I had taken those breaths out, it would have sounded ridiculous, would have sounded like this, this poor woman's not breathing for thirty seconds. So so I kind of I don't think you can sort of do a blanket well id breath everything. You might take a breath or two out if you need to trim some time. You know, if you're looking for that you know second or two that you know, well probably not two, but second second and a half that a couple of breaths can save. You know, that's always handy. Imagine if your voice timent was a free diver. For a massive long But. There is something for taking breaths out for time, which sometimes when you just collide all the words together and there's no space because you take the breaths out, you're actually better off putting that breath and that pause in there because it gives time for people to understand and to you know, it just makes it sound not as fast continue you know, compared to it just a continuous barrage of words. One thing about that though, is when like if I de breath and I take the breath out, I replace it with room noise. Yeah, with the space exactly, so the. Space between the woods is still there. Yeah, you're preserving the timing. That's the distinction. Because when we talk about the depreath thing, talk about debreathing, there's so many variations of a theme which is just reducing the breath, silencing the breath, or deleting the breath the space the breath was taking, which shortens the red and changes the timing. So you just want to make sure that when you do it it feels right. It has to still feel right. Yes, you can't do I mean, I hear so many people who take out breaths and just slam you know, the end of sentence, be I send of sentence onto the beginning of sentence b And you can't just do that. You know, you need to, of course, you need it still needs to sound natural. I did a session this is really quite bizarre, and they didn't end up using my voice, which I thought was quite funny, and it also all made sense the next day. So we're doing a session and the client could not even didn't know what they wanted or couldn't explain what they wanted, but they did some me a guide what I thought was a guide read on this film, which was a female voice, and I thought the read was kind of okay. I didn't really sort of get too deep into it, but it sounded fine to me, and I was kind of curious as to why they were going to change the voice. But anyway, the clients that are you know, we're really happy with that female read. Just at some of the words weren't correct the way she pronounced them. So my thought was, well, why don't you just call it back and get drop in the correct pronunciation. It wasn't until the next day and I was talking to my seventeen year old son and about this whole thing, and I played in the film and within ten seconds he went, that's an II. Oh really. I'm like wow, what And it's like I listened again and went, shit, you're right, it is an I. Hence the reason they couldn't get that person back to actually say the words correctly because that's how I pronounced it. There you go, that's interesting. A lot of people when they deal with AI and they're typing in the scripts, they have to misspell the words to get the AI to say it right, you right phonetics. Well, then the other thing about AI is like you over If you over sanitize the audio, then you are going to creep into AI territory. And then the irony is the AIS are adding in all these breaths and pauses and lit emotive snickers and things to sound more human, except it repeats them over and over and uses the same exact sing songy delivery the chat you does that all the time. He goes yeah, well and then no, no, it doesn't seem like rhythmic up and down over and over. So it's like, don't sound like an AI. Well, here's another one that was thrown into thrown to me the other day. Ray Kington, who we've talked about on the show before, sent me a message saying some revisions just don't make any sense. Now. If you know Ray, he's got a sort of similar to AP. He's got a really nice, deep resonant voice, right, and he got these revision back and it says the voice is a little too deep. Please revise so there is less bass in the voice. Also, please make the voice actor sound five to ten years older. What that's actually a contradiction because normally, if you want to sound older, you put more bassin, you know. You put a bit more I know exactly. But it's like ray as race. It is sort of like I think you should be maybe booking someone else, I don't know, yeah, exactly, Like oh wow, it's just crazy, isn't it. Yeah. Look, I mean as for the deep breath thing, I kind of you know, I come across people from time to time assume to have a blanket rule on yes, I take every breath out, And for me, that doesn't make a lot of sense. Blanket rules. I tend to I must admit when I if it's a thirty second ad that I'm doing or you know, primo or something, I. Have to feel. I think it's like music. Yeah, if you don't have a feel for music and the rhythm of music, and if you don't have feel, you have no business editing, because you're just going to make it feel weird, feel awkward, and just it'll lose its feel. You have to have a good feel for timing and natural peace, and you need to know. What it's This is funny made of mine dropped over last night. He's actually in the process of doing posts on a feature documentary and he just had to get away from the computer because he was going sideways. But we're talking about ads and then government stuff where they do it in various languages, and so he'll he'll get another language, like he might have ten other languages that he has to do. They edit for, but he's like, this one's running five seconds over, and they because what to hit is? I have no idea. I remember mixing live concerts when I was in college that were performers from India. We have a large Indian population at Virginia Tech, and you know, they would have someone from the tour, the tour manager or somebody would be sitting over my shoulder occasionally and saying, you know, adjust because I'm just listening to a sound, you know, and I'm balancing a sound, but I'm not conceiving the words. I don't know what the heck they're saying. So when you don't know what they're being what's being said, it's even harder to get a good mix because then you're not listening for intelligibility as much. At least that's that was my experience. Now again, that was music a little bit different, but you need to you need to understand understand what's being said. I think it's pretty important. Can't understand what's being said. Pretty basic, pretty premissive mixing, really, isn't it. I was going to use an example of the Police and what's the song I'm trying to think where he sits on the piano and then laughs in the intro. Yeah, yeah, he backed into it. Yeah, yeah, sting backs into it. Right. It's rock sand rock sand, that's right? Oh? Is that it? Yeah? Yeah, he sits on the piano and just hear and yeah, and it's like, you know, normally you go get rid of that and they've gone, Actually, that's really cool. Leave it in. Is there? Is there ever going to be mistakes and live and mistakes and finished albums anymore? Probably not misplaced basslines? No. Oh. Having said that, I've just been Somerset has been introduced me to her one of her new favorite bands called The Last Dinner Party, and they're an English all girl band. They're really good, like really out there that they they're very organic. In fact, when I first heard it, it was like, obviously their grandparents have been playing the music because it's very seventies until the point where they did a tour and Somerset went with a friend to see the concert and they did a cover of Sparks, this time big enough for both of us, and of course Somerset's the only person in the audiences gone, oh my god, it's one of my dad's favorite songs. But no one else knew what the hell it was because it's like that song's over fifty years old. Speaking of music, has anybody even has anybody seen the YouTube video that's doing the rounds at the moment, there's a channel where they get famous drummers in and they give them a track that they've never heard before, but they take the drums out and they get them to. Drum tool and then they do something different. Yeah, has anybody seen the one that Chad Smith did recently? And they got him to do that thirty seconds to mars track and the name of the song will lose me, but it's it's a really sort of heavy sort of rock, and so Chad does this really amazing, full on, like it's really busy drum track, like typical chat. He's just everywhere all over the kit. But the thing, the reason I'm saying this is talking about happy accidents. He breaks a stick, he doesn't miss a beat, like he's got one hand, literally going all over the kit for about three or four seconds while he reaches down and grabs his other and new stick and gets going again. Just make and you would never pick it. If you couldn't see it, you would never know what had happened. Amazing. They should have just got the drama from Judas Priest and he needs one stick. Judas Priests deflaper death lead. That's right, yeah, deflaper. If you want a bit of a laugh, they have a look up. They gave him a dua lipa or I think it was jeweleap. They gave him a dua lipa song a couple of months ago, and it's just hilarious, Like he's just he just goes completely off ball, like he's putting like a rock rhythm to this pop song and it's like completely crazy, but it still works. You still look at it me and go, oh my god, that still works. It's like Stuart Copeland he admits that he can't remember what the hell he played because it was all like yeah, and it's like I don't know what I just did. I can't do it again because I have no clue what I just did. I know, he said, that's why I can't do I'm not a studio musician. Yeah, I can't play the same tea twice. Yeah. When he was interviewed by Rick Piato, Uh, that was you know that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, he. Talked about Stingo Stingo. That's really funny. I wonder if the breath probably only on every breath you tea actually. There every breath you take out. Ed it out. I can't breathe. The audio Sweet and Austrian audio recorded US Connect, edited by Andrew Peat, mixed by Rovo. 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