Breath Control Plug-in

 

 

The Breath Control plug-in will automatically detect breaths in your vocal takes and suppress them. This can be an essential tool when editing a vocal track by streamlining a task that can be time-consuming when performed manually.

 

 

Note: The component Breath Control plug-in is only available in Nectar 2: Vocal Production Suite. 

How Breath Control Works

The Breath Control plug-in automatically analyzes the incoming vocal take and distinguishes breaths from sung vocals based on their harmonic structure. If any piece of the incoming audio matches a harmonic profile similar to a breath, the module will suppress that portion of the audio until sung vocals are detected. Different from a 'Threshold' based process in which the module is only engaged once the audio has risen to a certain volume, Breath Control will perform its analysis regardless of level. This allows for accurate breath recognition with a multitude of quiet or loud vocal styles with minimal adjustment of the module's controls.

 

Controls

Modes

  Gain

In Gain mode, the Breath Control plug-in will reduce the gain of breaths by an absolute amount, regardless of the level of the breath.  In some cases, this is desirable when trying to handle egregious breathing or as a way of removing all breaths from a particular spoken or sung vocal take. Depending on your settings however, this can result in unnatural sounding results as the very quiet breaths may be inaudible, while the loud breaths will be reduced to a normal level.

 

  Target

When in Target mode, the reduction amount of the 'Target' slider represents the desired level that you wish all detected breaths to be reduced to.  This can result in much more natural sounding breath reduction as the detected breaths in your audio are only reduced when necessary. Loud and abrasive breaths will be reduced heavily while quiet, natural sounding breaths will be left at the same volume.

 

Note: By default, the Breath Control plug-in will be in Target mode.

 

Sensitivity

This controls how sensitive the breath control plug-in is when detecting the harmonic structure of breaths in your incoming audio.

 

Gain (dB)

Sets the desired amount of gain reduction applied to all detected breaths, regardless of level.

 

Target (dB)

Sets the resulting desired level of all detected breaths above the set target.

 

Breaths Only

When enabled, only the audio of the detected breaths will be passed to the output of the module. This can help when setting the Sensitivity control in order to make sure that only the breathing in your audio is being processed.

 

Visuals

Gain Reduction Trace

The Gain Reduction Trace is a scrolling meter that displays the incoming signal’s waveform with a superimposed tracing that illustrates the amount of gain reduction taking place in real-time. 

 

Latency

In order for the Breath Control plug-in to have time to perform its analysis, it must incur a good deal of latency.  The result of this latency is that the incoming audio is delayed in time with respect to the other tracks in your session.  Modern audio applications have a feature called 'Delay Compensation' which will recognize the latency (delay) that Nectar requires and will adjust the tracks in your session accordingly - making sure that all of your tracks are aligned and in time with each other. This 'Delay Compensation' can only occur once the audio has been recorded into your digital audio workstation however.  When tracking (recording) your incoming audio the latency of the Breath Control module will cause a delay between when the audio comes in to your computer, and when it passes through Nectar.

Note: If your host has a limited number of samples of latency compensation, Breath Control may still cause tracks to be played back out of sync with each other. In these cases, we recommend processing your vocal takes with Breath Control as a separate offline process.