Technical question on removing/damping background noise

[tybert7]

So I was in one of my cover fits where I search covers to old songs, and I came across this cover by Muse to House of the Rising Sun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtsmMCIfZzI


I think it has to be THE greatest cover and vocal of the song of all time. The lead singer is fantastic on it, problem is... the background noise is so loud it almost drowns him out !!!!!!


His vocal is so good it still comes through but I wanted to sample your collective knowledge to see if there was a way to dampen the background music and leave more of his voice there.

 

[obobski]

So I was in one of my cover fits where I search covers to old songs, and I came across this cover by Muse to House of the Rising Sun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtsmMCIfZzI


I think it has to be THE greatest cover and vocal of the song of all time. The lead singer is fantastic on it, problem is... the background noise is so loud it almost drowns him out !!!!!!


His vocal is so good it still comes through but I wanted to sample your collective knowledge to see if there was a way to dampen the background music and leave more of his voice there.

with hundreds to thousands of dollars of professional hardware and software, you could not accomplish this on a level approaching what you wanted to do

putting it through something like Sound Forge with a compressor and similar will probably kick the vocals up, but you'll mangle the entire track in the process, with a professional DAW (hardware solution), you'd basically accomplish the same thing with slightly better results

my suggestions:
A) get higher quality than youtube (unless you've just provided the youtube link as an example)
B) accept that some recordings are done poorly, and there isn't a lot more you can do about it (unless you have the original masters and could re-cut it in the studio, there isn't a whole lot you can do)

 

[ashmedai]

With that quality of source...no, not much.

If you had it on an LP or something, yeah, there are tricks which can reduce noise to a varying degree. Sometimes you can cut it out almost entirely, but sometimes that's just the quality of recording you have. But no matter what, you'd need to examine a copy that hasn't been mangled by Youtube for starters.