Processing piano and vocals at the same time!

Hi!

I’ve made an acoustic cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Since it’s impossible to sing over a piano track with such an unstable tempo, I recorded vocals and piano at the same time.
My singing starts at 1:30, at 3:15 there is some very high (and loud) belting.
I made two mixes, can you give me some advice on how it should sound?

Thank you very much in advance
Jan

PS: The files
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4L0j7ncj7wUMmt6U0paeEREY1U?usp=sharing

You engineered yourself into a hole. We can’t take a mixed performance apart into separate vocal and piano parts, so there’s no way to process the voice without making the piano pump and fade.

I’m confused why you can’t use overdubbing—play the piano part and then sing to that with the piano in your headphones. Or do it backwards. Sing through the song and then play the piano to it. You can even add a metronome part as a guide for rhythm in your headphones.

There is a techie solution, too. Play an electronic piano into one channel and your headphones while you sing in real time into a separate microphone. Process each of the two track separately and then mix.

Way down at the bottom of the list is singing in a kitchen—or that’s what it sounds like you’re doing. How far away from the microphone are you? It sounds like you’re recording from across the room. You should be a shaka or power fist from the microphone depending on whether you’re using a blast filter or not.

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Doesn’t have to be a killer microphone, either. That works if you’re using any microphone. Directional ones are best if you have a live room.

Koz

I’d be tempted to make that more mono, to keep the vocal closer to the center of the stereo-field …

There are free plugins (which work in Audacity) to allow you to experiment with the stereo-image , e.g. … Mid-Side Encoder-Decoder Plugin [VST, AU, AAX] - MSED - Voxengo
Or you can adjust width in Audacity without plugins by creating a duplicate track, making it mono, then mixing it with a little of the original stereo track.