Fix a WAV, kick is to prominent

[Vigilante]

Hi guys, at my church, just for kicks, I recorded a track of our band from the output of one of our channels from the headphone amp. Ya it's lame, but it was really just for fun, I'm obviously not expecting a useful recording.

The sound came out good enough for us to give a listen, which is all I wanted so we can review the new song. However, just the kick drum came out really prominent and clipped all over the place. I guess during practice I didn't notice it was high somehow, or was turned up later and I didn't know it.

In any case, I just opened the WAV with Audacity and ran a compressor on it with a normalize to 0db. The "main" parts of the song in the WAV look normal, however the kick is still spiking. Refer to the attached image. This is the WAV after compress and normalize. And again, the quality is good enough to for us to have a laugh, but for educational purposes, I would like to know how to bring all those spikes of the kick down to the level of the rest of the WAV form, if that makes sense. In other words, remove the spikes and take out some of the prominence of the kick.

I've tried compressing more, but the ratio of spikes to main audio stays the same anyway. I've tried EQing out the lows, that doesn't work. I've played with limiters, maybe I did it wrong?

So if anybody has any ideas how I can even up those spikes and remove the booming kick, I would be happy to learn the technique.

The zip file contains a tiny snippet of audio with two "spikes" in it, i.e., the kick. Open it up in Audacity or some WAV file and hopefully you'll see the spikes as I do and tell me what to do, or at least tell me what this means. I can use any freebee audio program, or Audacity, and I have Cubase LE as well. If I can use one of those to edit the file, that would be cool.


Thanks!

[DonF]

I used Audacity to apply the Fast Lookahead Limiter plugin (from Steve Harris, plugin.org.uk), with input gain of about 9.5dB, limit of -0.1dBFS, and a fairly fast relase time, maybe 0.08s. That did smooth out the waveform a lot, but I wouldn't expect stellar results. It's impossible to tell much with such a short clip.

Btw, the "flattops" are in the original waveform -- the limiter plugin I used didn't introduce them.

Don

[noisewreck]

Use a brickwall limiter with about -6dB gain reduction. You might be able to get away with even more than -6dB. Give it a try. Listen, and if the sound starts to degrade or distort or lose definition, backoff on the limiter.

[Vigilante]

It was late at night so I just tried the built-in hard limiter in Audacity. I managed to get the signal down, and then ran it through the compressor again. That seemed to do the trick of taking the spikes down, but the "sound" of the kick is still fairly prominent. Of course, it doesn't sound like a kick, it sounds like the leftover screech of a clipping sound. But oh well, this works, it allowed me to bring the level of the whole tune up now that the spikes were taken down.

Thanks!

[giraffe]

do you have a multiband compressor?
(hopefully with look-ahead)

if you do try (hard to tell without listening) possibly 2 bands, one centered on the "meat" of the kick, but probably more importantly one on the attack. that's what will (i'm guessing) do the most to reduce the apparent volume of the kick.

fast attack, with look-ahead.