How to stop Blue Yeti from picking up the sound of air inhalation?

[SomeGuyDude]

^ also a great point. You sometimes see people talking about putting tons of different effects on their videos, de-essers and de-clickers, EQ and compression, noise removal and this and that, and the end result of it is always terribly unnatural. Unless you're a pro sound engineer, stacking all those tools on a vocal track is going to result in something ridiculously artificial and probably worse than if the audio was just raw.

I get people asking what I do with my mic audio now and again, and no one seems to believe me that the answer is... nothing but some compression. No noise removal, no micro-managing editing, just slap a compression (pre-set!) on there and be on with my day. If your room is set up right, or even moderately right, you don't need to do much. And if the room is BAD? Just do what you can to mitigate the biggest errors.

Think of it like this: imagine you're trying to get a good photograph of someone. You take a picture and their expression is off, the lighting is bad, they have a big zit, they're not looking into the camera, and there's people in the background that are distracting. Okay, sure, you could pull Photoshop out and start going crazy with the exposure settings, try to distort their face so they're smiling properly, pull the pupils so it looks like they're looking at the camera, edit out the pimple, remove the background, etc etc etc, but you know DAMN well the picture is going to look really artificial.

Alternately, you can take another picture with better lighting, make sure their face is right and that there's nothing in the background. Which is going to give you a better picture?

 

[Tarmack]

Unless you're a pro sound engineer, stacking all those tools on a vocal track is going to result in something ridiculously artificial and probably worse than if the audio was just raw.

Yep, and even in pro audio editing, they don't always actively remove breathing sounds. If you listen to music with just about any great singer, you'll hear those breaths, but only if you're listening for them.

 

[SomeGuyDude]

Yep, and even in pro audio editing, they don't always actively remove breathing sounds. If you listen to music with just about any great singer, you'll hear those breaths, but only if you're listening for them.

Yeah. Hell in hip hop it's a quick way to tell if someone does a verse all in one take or uses punch-in. Big Pun actually sounded like he could barely breathe a lot of the time, just added to the album's charm. XD

 

[DaRealApollo]

You could do what Tay Zonday did in chocolate rain where you lean and inhale away from the mic. If that is bothersome, then you can try distancing yourself a bit. It'll let in more background sound, but it may diminish the breathing. Other than that, noise removal or manual removal is the only other way I can think of.