Hi all.

Let me just start out by saying I am new to audio recording and I know next to nothing about this field, but I am finding it very interesting.

It all started because my daughter has wanted to be a singer since she was 8 years old. She's now 22 Naturally, I want to help her in any way I can, so when she said she wanted to record herself singing and start posting on youtube, I dove in and started learning about music and recording. I bought a microphone, an audio interface, and, being short on funds, rigged up a very tiny "studio" with all sorts of stuff people would donate.

We started with one song the other day: a cover to Barbra Streisand's "Don't Rain on my Parade". We grabbed a karaoke version off youtube and did one take. I brought the vocal and instrumental into Presonus Studio One, applied a few filters (Compression, EQ, and Reverb) using built-in presets, put it together in Final Cut and posted it. I think it sounds OK. It's acceptable. Nothing more. I think it can sound much better with the proper mixing. Currently, it doesn't "sit well in the mix".

See it here if you like:

Right off the bat I know that I can't expect much from a youtube karaoke. Also, we only did one take and my daughter's voice was all over the place in terms of loudness. She was also moving back and forth from the mic so that didn't help either.

So...here's where I need help. After watching countless online instructional videos on compression and EQing, I still find it's so much easier to watch a professional at work with professionally recorded files, as opposed to me working with what I have. And yet, I want to make it work. I'm not looking to be an audio engineer, but when my daughter wants to record herself, I want to be able to make it as close to professional sounding as i can.

I want to learn. Yes, even with my 50th birthday right around the corner, I still want to learn.

To that end, I'd like to provide the files I recorded and hope someone might like to take a stab at making this sound better. I would appreciate if that person can also show me exactly what settings they did to achieve this. I know it may be asking for a lot, but I can't tell you how much it would help me.

Thank you all. Here are the files if you are interested.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/48jrc1mb5c4d703/DROMP.zip

 

Last edited: May 19, 2017