Limiting Background Voices from Live Gig

If you recorded them in the track with the band..... nope. There is not a good, easy, or efficient way to remove that extra stuff now.

You should have recorded the band...either multi tracked, off the FOH mixer, seperate recording mix, mics at the front of the stage, AND then on a seperate track recorded the room with it's associated noise....

that way you can fade the crowd noise down as the band kicks in...... listen to bands on their live albums and that's what they do.

You could use gating IF, the noise was lower in level than the band, but you said it was actually louder than the bands material, so a gate will not stop it.

I don't of a way to fix the track now.... maybe someone else does....

Would have loved to been able to set up for an actual live recording setup, but we don't have the cash for the equipment needed.

I had my Roland BR600 at the front of the stage recording from the onboard mic, which worked much better than I thought.  Except for 2 problems.

1. Had it a little too much to the left of center and picked up the bass on that side more than the guitar which the Marshall was on the right hand side.  I actually EQ'd that recording down to the point it's not too bad.  Except the bass player is new and still learning our originals, so we turned him down a bit.  That worked ok for the overall sound in the room, but the recorder picked it up out of his amp.

2.  I actually forgot to hit "record" at the beginning of the 1st set.  One of those things where everyone was asking me questions before hand, running cables, found that electric outlet was too close to mic cables and got interference, etc, etc etc.  We were into the 3rd song when I realized I never hit record.  I actually yelled "Sh!t" in the 2nd verse.  Confused my drummer but we didn't miss a beat.

So that left us with the video audio.  Which again, is much better than I expected except for some crowd noise.  Maybe I'm asking the question wrong.  This would be much easier if I could draw a picture.

Say you are looking at the waveform for the recording.  Periodically there's a spike from someone at the bar yelling.  Can I create an envelope that will not decrease the overall volume but would "chop" off anything above a certain level?

Quite a few bands will take the signal from the mixer board assuming that you are miking everything.... if the FOH guy used headphones this can actually be a pretty decent mix...

Hey, that reverse-phase idea that 57Gregy mentioned sounds cool.  I'm at work and won't have a chance really to play with this until Saturday, hopefully.  The wife has a long honey-do lists for me.  Anyway, does anyone know if this is possible in MC?

Guitarhacker, guitar and bass were not mic'ed.  Mackie 1202, maxed out.  We need a new mixer, but $$$ tight right now.

Beagle, great name by the way.  I love beagles.  If the reverse-phase idea is not an option, your idea sort of sounds like what I was getting at.  Thanks.  And Yes and No.  It once was a church.  It was constructed as a church in 1910, but the congregation grew too large and they moved in 1985.  It's right next door to my drummer's house, and his sister and brother-in-law bought it a few years ago.  It has a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath living space with kitchen and dining room in the back.  Then the church area is out front.  Normal looking church space, I'd say 35' x 120' with 25' ceilings.  Those are probably pretty close dimensions.  We took all of the pews out and put down hardwood floor.  There's a 120 inch screen above the alter (we ran a slideshow on it).  Now the best part.  They knocked out part of the wall to the coat closet at the back of the church.  Cut down the baptism table, and used THAT as the bar top!  The night we "christened" it by doing shots, my drummer said he figured he was going to hell.  He said that he had been baptized on that as a baby, and now he was doing shots at it.

The subject came up of whether it was still "sacred ground" after we played.  I was encouraging ladies to remove their tops (many obliged), and encouraging the use of the F-bomb, since we do sort of a "sing-along" heavy song that uses that word quite a bit.  There's some worse things that happened that evening, that I won't go into here.  So, with that in mind, "Sh!t" wasn't so bad...

From discussions, I'm comfortable with the fact that once the property was sold, the church probably de-sanctified the land.  Although something that I heard on this recording this morning has me a little concerned that de-sanctification of the land may not be enough.  Man, I love playing Rock-n-Roll!!!!

I don't think that anything is really going to work, It falls under the "can't take Eggs out of a cake" catagory. You can try a program called Goldwave, it has a very sophisticated noise reduction plugin, but still you need to cut frequencies that are rampant all over the track. What you do is high light a section of the track that nothing but crowd noise and tell it to remove that. But you will lose a lot from the remaining stuff.

As far as de-sanctification, well i wouldn't worry about that, People are sacred to God, not buildings (unless your talking about soloman's temple, and even that is gone now). Although getting baptised on a table and later doing shots on it, with topless girls around makes me feel a bit funny.

Oh!! I know what you need to get rid of that crowd noise, A MIRACLE!!, but i wouldn't count on one this time, know what i mean vern?!?!?

Welcome to the forum. Rob

even using a surgical envelope, you will hear the lack of sound.

I was using an envelope yesterday to pull down a louder transient.  I was able to hear a gap in the music after I reduced the level because the envelope overlapped a bit on the normal level and pulled it down too. I was able to undo and zoom in for more precision and it worked out OK..... however, to use an envelope to remove unwanted noise..... such as a glitch or in this case people's voices, I think you will end up with choppy material.....

However, it is worth a try..... work on a small section of the music where the voices are pretty evident. If it works then you can work through the whole show..... I'm thinking that will be tedious for a full band show. I know how much work is involved in enveloping half a dozen instrument tracks for a 3 minute song..... if all else fails you can delete the envelopes and simply record it again.