Any suggestions on how to add "breath" to a spoken female part?
I want to add "s3x" to a woman's voice-over.

Hi gustabo,

To my knowledge, there isn't anything you can physically do if the breathiness is not there in the track. However, I've had some really good results sculpting vocals using tools like the one's you see here: http://www.antarestech.com/products/avox-evo.shtml

Mutator
Sybil
Throat

You can really do some trippy things with those plugs as far as adjusting for sounds, breath, throat size and totally manipulating vocals in various ways. I can't promise you they will give you what you're looking for, but that's definitely where I would start if I was after something like what you're asking about. Good luck. :)

-Danny

Quite an interesting question!
First things to try that pop in my mind (used very subtly) are chorus, harmonizer and distortion. That's to create a more misty, deeper "bedroom tone" :o). Maybe some EQ is needed as well, and advanced pitch-shifting, as Danny suggests, depending on the type of the voice.

Say, doubled track, the other one quite low volume, panned 20-30% off from the main voice, with distortion or something.
This all is just imagination, I've never tried anything like that for spoken voice, and it may be these simply don't work at all.
 
Compression, maybe parallel, should be tried, too.

Try a whisper track w/ the VO artist whispering the exact performance (or as close as possible).  Mix it in and see if it doesn't help.

Also, +1 on the antartes stuff.

@

I'm guessing there's no way to re-record the spoken word part?

If a "do-over" is out, perhaps you could have a different woman read the part, with the breathiness included, and combine the two.  You could also try having that different woman attempt only the breathiness, and then incorporate that into the spoken word.

I'm not familiar enough with any post-production techniques to achieve what you want.  I worked in commercial radio 20 years ago, and women either had or did not have that bedroom voice.  Yes, smoking two packs a day can help, but that's only going to deepen an already attrractive speaking voice.

I've done this in a bit different way before when the original artist wasn't available to do a "whisper track". I've used a Waves plugin that was supposed to be a vocoder (Morphoder?). One of the noise source options in the plugin was basically white noise. I used the original vocal track to modulate the white noise (via the plugin) and applied a bit of EQ to the output, mixing it back in with the original vocal on a seperate bus. Worked pretty well, as I remember it.
RC

In the past I have recorded myself doing just the very starts of letters like F, C, J, Q, V, H, T and S sounds etc. You can do them quite softly. And cutting and placing them on a second track right under the starts of words that need them and the correct ones. They come in handy for other things too. Like giving song vocals more diction.

Filter out the low end when adding these things to females. And the second track is very soft of course only barely noticeable. It works pretty well. 

I wonder why it is so breathless. I like to record voice overs up pretty close to the mic. The pop filter will take out the plosives and you get all that lovely up close and breathy stuff naturally with added detail. Much better signal to noise ratio too. It is good to add a little low end to any voice over. The proximity bass boost adds the low end rather naturally and is easily controlled.

Thanks everyone for your input.

A great singer in LA (I'm on the East Coast) did the voice-over for me as a favor using a Blue Mic and Garageband, at home. Don't want to ask for too many favors so I was hoping to salvage what she sent me.

Don't have any of the Antares stuff or Waves stuff so what I ended up doing is running it through multi-band compression, doubling and eq'ing along with a touch of verb.

Actually turned out pretty well!
Once again, thanks!

Cool.