Topic: Reducing reverb on recording?

[stantheman1976]

Is there any way without a ton of trouble I can tone down the reverb I have on a recording?  It's a recording of an announcer taken from the mixer and the reverb sounds really harsh at times. 

I'm using Audition 3.0

[Gutbucket]

That's a tough one. 

You might try running it through a mid-side encode/decode and increasing the mid ratio.  If the direct announcement is mostly mono and the reverb is mostly stereo info that will reduce the reverb content at the expense of the stereo width of the recording.

[Church-Audio]

Is there any way without a ton of trouble I can tone down the reverb I have on a recording?  It's a recording of an announcer taken from the mixer and the reverb sounds really harsh at times. 

I'm using Audition 3.0

Every reverb has hot spots where the time is greater and more noticeable. For example Lexicon reverbs * I love them * allow you to change the xover location and reverb times for the highs and lows. What I am getting at is listen to the sound of the reverb and listen to the part of the spectrum that you hear it the most in and try and find the "bumps" in the frequency response that are sticking out thats where some eq can be applied to the offending sections to reduce the apparent levels some good places to start are generally speaking around 250 and anywhere from 3k to 8k for high end. Remember to use a good parametric eq plug in and use the bandwidth and frequency knob with the gain boosted until you find the real bump and then knock it down. Its pretty hard to do and very time consuming but it can be done. Most experienced sound engineers would never put effects on an announcer.. Must have been his first picnic...

Here is a good link that explains some of what I just said with some neato pictures
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/effects_reverb.html

[stantheman1976]

I ran both recordings through the center channel extractor in Audition.  This worked well.  Seems that almost all the reverb was attached to the middle channel and the other sounds I wanted to keep were attached to L/R.  It dropped the good information by about 9dB so I had to amplify a bit again adding a tad more noise since it was 16 bit, but it made the recording 100% better overall.