Remaster Old Recording

[KevinTheDrummer]

I've got a stereo mix of a 20 year old recording that ended up with the cymbals being too hot in the mix. What are some ways to rectify that when all I've got is the final mix. EQ by itself helps a little. But, beyond a small adjustment other instruments suffer in the mix.

Thanks in advance.

[sunrat]

You could try multiband compression. Or dynamic EQ with the EQ range set for the loudest cymbal frequencies; that way the EQ only kicks in when the cymbals are hit and the rest of the time the sound is unaffected. TDR Nova could be good for this.
Of course the settings would need to be optimally tweaked whichever method you choose.
Spectral editing could be another option. Izotope RX does this really well but I've read Audacity also has the capability. Basically you just bring up a spectrogram and use a draw tool to attenuate those unwanted frequencies.
https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/5-creat...g.html#two
http://help.izotope.com/docs/rx/pages/us...repair.htm
Izotope RX costs $$$ and is amazing for audio repair, but TDR Nova is a free option which may work well for this case, although the two are fairly unrelated operationally. Multiband compression would be less likely to offer the surgical precision but worth a try.

[madmaxmiller]

One more for multiband compressing: try XT-SC
https://youtu.be/1z66QNt91vQ

MMM

[arthie]

Hard to say without listening to it, but some more options as the already mentioned (which would probably be first to try options) would be:
try Ozone "Spectral Shaper" (its easy to play with and selfexplaining).
Or you even could play with some tape emulation with a adjustable head-gap setting, that sometimes can just round over these problem high frequencies in a nice way (we have a analog hardware tape emulation from ADT, this one I can recomend).

[CurtZHP]

Try a de-esser.

[Klaus]

Try a de-esser.

https://new.steinberg.net/spectralayers/mastering/

Klaus

[Theotherguy]

Like artie said "Hard to say without listening to it".
However, if you have the original analog recording, I would try to tame the cymbals as much as possible in the analog world before I convert it. Solve the problem at the source as much as you can. Then work on it with plugins.
Of course if you do not have the analog recording that would not be an option. 
Best of luck
Alex

[JamieLang]

See how much you can do ONLY heavily deEssing (or multiband suggested above as a secondary) the difference signal. If the drum overheads are stereo mic'd, a LOT of the cymbals will end up in the difference. Most of what needs to stay loud and fidelity should be in the sum, so you can likely go pretty heavy handed with it.

Quick check would be to just hit the mono switch and see if it gets better.

In Mixbus's monitoring, mono+inverting the L channel will allow you to monitor the difference. FWIW.

[Jostein]

I can only say that I agree with the suggestions above.

I try de-esser first. If that does not do the trick, then I try a multi-band compressor. Sometimes I use an EQ as well and sometimes a combination of all of them. But a de-esser or multi-band compressor is what I try first. A dynamic EQ can also do the work.

[arthie]

Perhaps you could update us all after your tries. Would be interesting to hear.