Tip 1: To breath or not to breath

Did you ever listen to a radio or tv commercial only to find yourself out of breath at the end of the spot? Not because the announcer was going too fast, but because there weren't any audible breaths in the production. It is a very typical technique to completely silence breaths made by announcers, to shorten the amount of time a read takes, or to combat a heavy breather. Here is a tip you can use on your workstation to shorten breaths, make up some valuable time, and make it sound more natural. Find the breath in question. Select a portion of the breath, (the middle)and delete it, leaving a small amount at the beginning and at the end, now pull the two bits of existing audio together and apply a short cross fade(about 5ms). This shortens the duration of the breath, makes it less noticeable, and creates natural transitions from word to word. If the breath still offends, bring the gain of the breath down by 3 to 10db. Now breath in...breath out!

Tip 2: No! Not that way! This way!!

Have you ever had a singer behind the microphone that just couldn't get the phrasing on a vocal line the way you wanted it, or just sung a little too lazy for the mix? Here is a tip that saved a couple of vocal performances. Is this cheating? Well, of course it is! My experience is with Pro Tools, but this tip can be used in other DAW's, and the VocAlign plug in by Synchro Arts. If you are not familiar with this handy little app., check it out at http://www.synchroarts.co.uk/. After the singer as gone home (no need to offend), open a new track and go into the studio and sing the phrase the way you hear it. You don't have to worry about pitch, you will only be using this track as a guide. Open the Voc Align plug-in. Select the newly sung stellar performance (that's yours), and hit the GUIDE button. That loads the audio into the plug-in. Now select the same exact audio in the offending track, and hit the DUB button on the plug in, Next hit the ALIGN button. Delete your track (destroy the evidence) and voila, they sang it exactly the way you wanted them to. There are some other settings on the plug-in because results may vary. This is not a substitute for a proper performance. Consult your physician if you have a session that lasts more than 4 hours.