Stand-up comic's live recordings

[richardpayne]

I’m a comedian in Rochester and I record my shows live to minidisc with one mike and use Cool Edit to edit the tracks. These tracks sound great on home stereo but have great extremes in volume that make listening in the car hard.

Questions:

1) I have a problem in that on some tracks there is a great difference in volume between my voice (which can often be soft) and audience volume (which can often be very loud). I have read about compression and limiting but don’t understand these concepts well. I wouldn’t want to make such a big change in a recording so as to make it sound odd. Do you have any advice about safe levels to compress? Is compression even what I need to make my voice and the audience closer in volume?

2) Let’s say I have two tracks that I am trying to edit to a single cd, and they both have very different volumes that I am trying to get closer to one another. I know I can lower or raise volumes in Cool Edit but when I raise a track volume too much there is distortion. My question: When you reduce the volume of a track in Cool Edit, are there any changes to the sound of the track other than volume? It seems to me when I lower the sound of a track a kind of hiss appears.

Thank you,

Richard Payne

[ikon]

you need to try dynamic processing i think...im not that good at this stuff but i believe you need to do that

[ace516]

maybe try the compander preset and work your way from there. or make two tracks, one with the audience's voice expanded with your voice compressed and one with the audience's voice compressed and your voice expanded. and mess around with the volumes.

compressor baby. that's the keyword. compressor. -->dynamics processing, as ikon said. mess around a bit in CEP/AA.