Fixing Proximity on a track that is already on tape?

[Rokket]

My wife's niece found out about my little hobby and she made a cassette tape of some karaoke songs that she wanted me to fix and burn to CD for her. The god-awful "reverb" on the karaoke mic aside (I can work with that, some), she was eating the mic when she was recording and I have a ton of ear killing proximity effects to try and clean up. Any pointers?

 

[scrubs]

My wife's niece found out about my little hobby and she made a cassette tape of some karaoke songs that she wanted me to fix and burn to CD for her. The god-awful "reverb" on the karaoke mic aside (I can work with that, some), she was eating the mic when she was recording and I have a ton of ear killing proximity effects to try and clean up. Any pointers?

Sounds like a fun project! Since proximity effect is a rise in bass response when close to the mic, you should be able to just run a low cut EQ to roll off most of it (works o.k. for plosives too). Young girls probably don't have much range under 250Hz, anyway, so it shouldn't affect the tone of her voice much (of course, the backing track will suffer). If that doesn't do it, try some multiband compression just hitting the lower frequencies. If there's a lot of distortion from "eating the mic," you're probably screwed.

 

[Rokket]

Sounds like a fun project! Since proximity effect is a rise in bass response when close to the mic, you should be able to just run a low cut EQ to roll off most of it (works o.k. for plosives too). Young girls probably don't have much range under 250Hz, anyway, so it shouldn't affect the tone of her voice much (of course, the backing track will suffer). If that doesn't do it, try some multiband compression just hitting the lower frequencies. If there's a lot of distortion from "eating the mic," you're probably screwed.

Hey, thanks! There isn't a lot of distortion, so I should be OK. The backing tracks are pretty much a non-issue because she didn't listen to me when I told her how to set it up, and the vocals are WAAAY over the top of the mix, so they are suffering anyway. I have a multi-band compressor plugin, I'll give it a shot.

You are the man!

 

[Rokket]

This tape is the reason that my wife wanted me to transfer all her cassettes to CD too, if you remember that thread. So it's going to be fun, but then I have a shitload of work to do after it's done....

 

[masteringhouse]

As Scrubs mentioned this is one case where a multi-band compressor (or a side-chain in a compressor) can help in addition to a high pass filter. Set the threshold so that reduction occurs during the plosives and adjust the ratio for the amount of reduction desired. Attack and release should be fairly fast. The frequency to trigger from is probably in the 100Hz and below range.

 

[Rokket]

As Scrubs mentioned this is one case where a multi-band compressor (or a side-chain in a compressor) can help in addition to a high pass filter. Set the threshold so that reduction occurs during the plosives and adjust the ratio for the amount of reduction desired. Attack and release should be fairly fast. The frequency to trigger from is probably in the 100Hz and below range.

Very timely post, Tom. I was just getting ready to start! I did a couple test runs with it, and I'll be damned if it doesn't make the tracks sparkle a bit more! I would post a bit for you to hear, but I don't dare, since it's all karaoke tracks.
Thanks for the advice, both of you! I learn something new here every day!