How to deal with harsh peaks in this recording?

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brassplyer

brassplyer

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I hope this is the right forum, it seemed to be the closest fit.

I have a mono .wav file and want to do some treatment to it. Overall sound isn't too bad but there are some issues. Here's a short sample - the main problem is with the harshness/spikiness/distortion in the female vocal. This was off streaming video, they were using a decent mic but I don't think they it set up ideally and maybe had her too close.

This is a sample of the original 44.1 wav file. I haven't made 5 posts yet so am kludging the link.

fileden daht com/files/2008/3/11/1809238//sample.wav

In particular listen to the last spike in "BAY-bee I was talkin'...".

This harshness is representative of the issues throughout the recording.

My ultimate goal is to smooth this out, add mild reverb and do a Pan/Expand to create a faux stereo. I've tried various EQ schemes, the Slim Slow Slider C3 multi band eq VST plugin, nothing really seems to achieve what I'm looking for. The multiband compression actually seems to increase the harshness.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for all input.
 
Simple volume automation is usually the best approach. But if the file is damaged from tracking too hot, there's little that can be done with it short of restorative work (which is no guarantee either).

Yes -- Overcompression (and especially maul-the-band compression) would tend to accentuate such anomalies.
 
Waves De-Esser should work a treat if what i think is the problem.
 
Conversely multiband compression can also when used with skill improve the problem, especially if the issue is peak signal related.

cheers
 
Well, the good news is, I zoomed right in on the waveform and it's not clipped so there is hope for the file.

I played with a couple of things and think I got best results with the multiband compressor. However it took a fair bit of playing with settings to make it sound better, not worse. I suggest soloing band three (if you're in Audition...from your description it sounds like you are), move the mid crossover frequency up and play with the threshold and gain settings to create a negative gain on band three.

Conversely, I also had a play with parametric EQ and found notching out frequencies around 5.3K (with a bandwidth of about 100Hz) could provide some pleasing results on a short loop...but I didn't play the whole clip to see if this gives any unfortunate funnies elsewhere in the track.

Frankly, I think any of the ideas from de-esser to multiband comp to parametric EQ could help--but each takes some playing and experimenting to see which gives you what you want.

Bob
 
Side-note: a de-esser mostly just a frequency-dependent compressor, much like a simple multi-band.
 
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