Newbie Question - what the devil can I do with this?

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Goldilox

Goldilox

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We did a live acoustic session at a local radio station. I'd like to do something with the results, but I'm not sure how to get the best of the tracks. It was engineered live in the studio to a live broadcast so all they've sent me is a two hour stereo track of the whole thing, that I can cut up & play with.

So here's a track. I'm obviously stuck with the mono mix. I'd like to de-emphasise the vocals and bring out the snare & guitar a bit more. If I can hide those odd bits of clipping (particularly obvious on the first line of the vocal) somehow that'd be nice as well. How would you experts proceed?
 
Cheers! Well that definitely sounds much better - what did you do? I can obviously hear a fair bit of reverb but I'd be interested to know what else (I'm interested in training my ears, apart from having another four songs on the same show engineered in similar haphazard fashion)

There was a sound check - but it had to be done in the time it took for a record to play as we were in the same studio space as the presenters - and I guess I must have sung louder in performance.
 
It seems to be a natural tendency to sing louder in the real performance than the sound check, after all you have all that adrenaline running during the performance. A good engineer should have realized that and started with levels low rather than high.

As for what I did, I opened it in Reaper. Dropped the level down when the first vocal came in (of course that dropped the guitar and snare also, but that can't be avoided). Then I ran it through TC Electronics M30 Reverb (Gentle Vocal Booth setting about 500ms decay time). Next I put it through T-RackS Mastering suite (boosted a bit at 2Khz, compressed, limited and clipped to get the vocal under control).
 
Ok...so here's the second track we did. Feeling daring so I've had a go at mastering this one myself first using the onboard tools in cubase - ideas on what I can do better very welcome.

Raw

Mastered

If anyone is interested I compressed to a ratio of about 3:1 put the limiter on the 'auto' setting, added reverb and EQed with a narrow parametric + 4db boost at 4k to sharpen up the snare, a 3db cut at 1.3k to make the vocals a bit less overwhelming, and a wider 5db boost at 315hz to bring out the guitar a bit.
 
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