Help Improving a Live Album

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

So, I’m a novice when it comes to using Audacity and have been more or less ‘trial and error-ing’ my way through using it. Getting to the point, I have an audio rip of a live concert DVD (concert in question is the Seattle ‘89 Metallica show) and I am really enjoying it, but me being the audiophile I am, am disappointed that the rhythm guitars, especially James’, are so low in the mix. When they’re playing alone (like the Battery intro, for example), they sound good, but once the vocals, bass, and drums kick in, the guitars almost get completely buried underneath.

My question is this: Is there anything I can do in Audacity that will allow me to bring the guitars up more in the mix without compromising the rest of the audio (aside from actually being able to work with the soundboard recording itself, which is definitely not an option here)? The bass and drums sound great already and I can adjust the EQs to allow for James’ vocals to punch up through the mix nicely, but I really want to be able to hear the rhythm guitars as well since the playing and tone are top-notch on this recording.

Thoughts or suggestions?

2

The most useful tool for this type of job is the Equalization effect, but I see you’ve already tried that.
There are two ways to make a good recording of a live gig:

  1. You have have access to the mixing desk and create a mix for the recording that is independent of the front of house mix.
  2. You are extremely lucky and it just comes out sounding good.
    Post-processing of the recorded mix is usually of limited benefit, with equalization being the most useful tool.

Sometimes, if the peaks that correspond to drum hits are very high compared with the rest of the sound, dynamic compression and/or limiting can help a little to bring out other sounds. I doubt that it will help, but you could try the Compressor effect with settings similar to this (Normalize the audio to 0 dB before running this effect):
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If you find that it makes some improvement (test it on a short section), try twiddling the Threshold and Noise Floor settings for optimum results.