Bluesygirl

Here's (roughly) the steps I took. I did the entire edit in Garageband and used no auxiliary gear. (Note: Many of the levels/controls in GB are not very exact, unfortunately, so I will only refer to general settings and presets).

1. Downloaded 2001mic clip and imported .wav file into Apple Garageband. This was unbelievably easy.

2. The file I downloaded was in mono and sounded thin so the first thing I did was duplicate the track into stereo, then panned L and R at approx. 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock, respectively.

3. I EQ'd both tracks in order to add some depth to the bass and some clarity to the treble. There are a number presets you can use in GB or you can use a "manual" mode and make some finer adjustments. I found a preset called "Improve Guitars" that I liked, which gives a moderate bass boost, a moderate cut in the midrange, and a slight boost on the highs.

4. I added a slight amount of reverb to the track, choosing "manual" and then placing the level around 30% (on a scale of 0-100).

5. There was some considerable hiss on the original track and trying to reduce it took quite a bit of experimenting. I first tried adding a noise gate and making test adjustments. Unfortunately, you don't have that much control over the gate parameters in GB and I couldn't dial in the right amount of gate without clipping. I abandoned the gate idea and settled on a small amount of compression, which seemed to reduce the hiss, albeit very slightly.

6. The overal level of the track seemed low so I made some adjustments to the master track output level in order to get better signal before converting and exporting the file.

7. I cut a second or two of space before the intro and cut a few seconds off the end.

8. Finally, I created a fade out at the end of the track.

9. After changing the preferences in iTunes to export to mp3 format, I exported the edited track to iTunes.