Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) becomes attractive recently for random noise attenuation because of its convenient implementation and ability in dealing with non-stationary seismic data. In this paper, we summarize the existing use of EMD in seismic data denoising and introduce a general hybrid scheme which combines $f-x$ EMD with a dipping-events retrieving operator. The novel hybrid scheme can achieve a better denoising performance compared with the conventional $f-x$ EMD and selected dipping event retriever. We demonstrate the strong horizontal-preservation capability of $f-x$ EMD that makes the EMD based hybrid approach attractive. When $f-x$ EMD is applied to a seismic profile, all the horizontal events will be preserved, while leaving few dipping events and random noise in the noise section, which can be dealt with easily by applying a dipping-events retrieving operator to a specific region for preserving the useful dipping signal. This type of incomplete hybrid approach is termed as selective hybrid approach. Two synthetic and one post-stack field data examples demonstrate a better performance of the proposed approach.