Vocals are great, Instruments too loud - Please Help

[swalker31]

Please help I'm a WavePad virgin (literally just purchased). I have an old recording ripped from a cd. The vocals are great but the drummer sounds like Animal from the muppets show. Is there a function to alter the drums?

 

Swalker

 

[nchBen]

Hi Swalker,

Before we get on to ways of decreasing the volume of the drums, it might be worth revisiting how the track sounds on the original CD. When you play the CD do the drums sound loud then as well? If so, then obviously the original recording is to blame and you can skip ahead to see my suggestions on how to reduce them. If not, then what options did you specify when you ripped the CD? If you ripped to mp3 or some other compressed format then perhaps try increasing the quality and see if that helps.

 

Assuming the drums sound too loud on the CD, then there are a couple of things you could try to reduce them. There are no hard and fast rules here, you will need to experiment with things until you get a satisfactory result, and you may never get exactly what you're looking for.

 

First of all, try and compress the dynamic range of the track. Effectively this means that you are trying to lower the volume of the loudest parts while leaving the rest unaffected. You can find WavePad's compressor under the 'Levels' tab. The exact settings you will need to use will depend very much on the track, so I can't really give you any detailed advice here other than to say that if you click on the help button on the compressor dialog you will get some instructions on how to use each slider.

 

Another thing which may help is to use the equalizer to help reduce the parts of the frequency spectrum where the offending drums are residing. You can find the equalizer on the 'Levels' tab right next to the compressor.

 

Right at the end when you have everything as good as you can get, you may like to also normalize the file to bring the overall volume back up.

 

If none of this works then if you'd like I can take a look at the file for you and see if I can do something. Just cut out a small section of the file and upload it to a dropbox account and send me a private message with the link.

 

Regards,

Ben