How would you deal with this spiky vocal track?

[brassplyer]

I isolated a vocal from a karaoke performance by lining it up with the instrumental track and inverting one. Works mostly except for some residual high freq stuff that stays behind. Problem is it was recorded with a cheap condenser mic and the girl's belty voice creates a lot of spiky resonances. I'm trying to tame those while retaining the basic clarity of the recording.

Here's a short sample of the full 44.1 wav file. The only difference between this and the original is I've tried to balance out the volume level of some of the more obnoxious peaks but the basic spikiness is still there.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/11/1809238//harsh_vocal_sample.wav

If your site advisor gives you a warning on this site, they've had issues in the past with people uploading malware but there's nothing wrong with this file.

A dynamic eq plugin helps but doesn't seem to provide a complete answer. I've tried chaining together the dynamic eq with various graphic eq profiles but still so far haven't fixed it to my satisfaction.

Any suggestions on how to deal with this? Re-recording isn't an option. I need to deal with this performance.

Thanks.

 

[mjbphotos]

A cheap condensor and a 'belty' voice? Why bother?

 

[brassplyer]

A cheap condensor and a 'belty' voice? Why bother?

It's something I'm doing for someone. No point in complaining about the circumstances, I had no control over them. Just looking to fix the vocal as much as possible.

 

[mjbphotos]

Use your faders - decrease the track volume when the spikes happen.

 

[brassplyer]

Here's an example of what I've got. The formula I finally settled on involved first manually trying to even things out with a volume envelope on the isolated vocal before mixing with the track followed by a combination of dynamic eq, graphic eq, reverb and compression.

The before and after. Not sure if I should bump the vocal up a hair more or not. I notice on the original Melissa Etheridge recording they've got her very buried in the mix going by the YouTube video.

Before

After