try compressing with a very slow release - if you time it right you may be able to lose a bit of the reverb. Might help a bit.

I've done it to varying degrees of succes.
The small (or large ) room slapback sound is there for good. I never could adequately get rid of it. but some of the ambient sound I could either gate or my best success was using a noise reduction program where I noise printed the ambient sound and stripped it from the track which dried it up pretty good. Added a few artifacts though.

Thanks Giles, thanks Tom,

Interesting tips, I'll go and experiment with both your suggestions.

Tom: how does one go about making a noise print and removing that from the track? I know I have the denoiser plugin available in Wavelab 4.0, which I bought for mastering, but I have not used it yet... Still strung up in the mixing phase... Do you happen to know if this will to the trick for me? Or do I need to buy a different plugin? (I hope not, I just emptied my pockets on WL)

Anyway, thanks so far, right now I have something to work on tonight.

Rob

Rob,
I use the denoiseing program in Samplitude. It probably works the same way as in WaveLab, but I have not tried Wavlab before.
With Samplitude, you highlight a section of the track that has the noise on it you want to destroy, such as at the beginning of a track before you start singing.You activate the "get noise sample" feature to which it analyses the content of that clip, inverts the phase of it, then allows you to add that inverted sample back into the track to effectively cancel the offending noise. Samp has many option on how much you can add back, you add to taste until you start hearing artifacts and then back off.

I'd say a gate/expander and a lot of experimnetation time would be your best bet.

If you can rent or borrow an SPL Transient designer you might try it for this. If you're not familiar with the unit, it has two controls per channel called "Attack" and "Sustain". Either control has positive or negative ranges, so you can add or subtract attack or sustain.

Most useful with percussive sounds, but I've used it to dry up reverb successfully also.

Check the link below for more info.

http://

Over the weekend I did some experimenting with your suggestions, and I can say that I do have a better voice track than before. Basically I applied all your suggestions. Although the 'character' of the track is still more or less the same, the tricks I applied have reduced it.

Thanks a lot.

Rob

(and next time, I'll make sure to sit in on the recording session...)

PS. Screws, thanks for the suggestion, but there was no SPL transient designer anywhere near my DAW. Seems to be an interesting piece of equipment though...

Hi Rob

Just a thought,

Were the singers gathered around the stereo mic?

If so maybe it's worth comparing the left and right mic track seperatley to see if one mic input sounds "tighter" than the other if so dump the other channel for that vocal and pan the now mono (dryer?) vocal to the appropriate spot in the stereo image. You could do this for every vocal part.

Matt

I hate to rain on the parade, but I'd say record it again, this time the way it should have been done. I know it isn't what you want to hear, but in my experience there's nothing worse that spending time spinning your wheels on something where it would take much less effort and tears to just do it over. Either way, I hope it all works out for you. :tu:

I definetly vote for the SPL transient designer, I'd use the hardwareversion but Pulsar/Creamware did a software version... try it if you can, nothing (expanding / compressing ...) works better than it for drying wet signal. I guess to also try to vary the Stereo width of the signal with some spectralizer such as waves S1