Removing Vocals From A Favorite Song

[JayR1415]

Hello,

Hopefully someone can help me out. I'm looking to remove vocals from a song. I have a friend that i'm recording and I would like to remove the orginal vocals and just have the arrangement, so it sounds like its her own song. Basically like a karioki (mispelled) song. PLEASE HELP!!!!

Thanx!
JayR

[atrest]

i think you can covert the stereo track to mono (pan to center) and then reverse the phase. but that gets rid of everything panned dead center, and makes the song sound not so good.

[pttele]

Not to put a damper on your hopes, but assuming that the existing music is already summed to stereo, it would be impossible to unsum them.

You could try the aforementioned trick, but then lose everything that was panned dead center (kick drum, snare, vocals) and part of anything that is not panned hard in one direction.

The only way to do it while maintaining sonic quality, is to build it from the ground up.

I'd think of it like this - The vocal (after summing) is no longer its own independent wave form. It rides along with everything else.

[JasonRomney]

Here's a better way to do it using the same polarity cancellation concept but still keep the stereo image and keep the kick drum and bass:

Start with your two tracks for the source material. One panned hard left, one panned hard right. Create a post-fade send on each track and route them both to the same mono bus. Now create a mono aux track and set its input to the bus you routed the signal to. Insert two 1-band EQ plug-ins on the aux track. Set one to high pass set the other to low pass. Make sure you click the polarity flip button on just one of the plug-ins. Now slowly bring the level of the aux up until you hear the voice start to cancel out. When you get there adjust the high-pass filter to allow the kick and bass to be heard. Now adjust the low-pass to allow through any other non-vocal program material that may be in the high frequency range that may also be in the center. You may need to readjust the aux level after you fiddle with the filters. Keep tweaking the filters and aux level until you get the best result.

In the end you still have a stereo track, a kick drum and a bass line and you've successfully cancelled out the vocal (if it is on the center track). Keep in mind that you can't do anything about the reverb from the vocal and you can't do anything about it if the vocal is not in the center.

Jason

[JasonRomney]

Actually after thinking about it, using this method you should be able to remove a vocal that isn't in the center. Just pan your sidechain to the place you want to cancel. I haven't tried this but it seems like it would work.

[JayR1415]

Thanx a lot jason, I'm just started to learn Pro Tools and i'm loving every moment, but sometimes it gets fraustrating. Well again thanx again and hopefully I can ask you more info in the future.



JayR [email protected]

[senyc]

Has anyone used that Alesis Vocal Zapper? It's described as a vocal reducer(does it not eliminate vocals?). Sounds interesting though at $99 and with a bunch of settings.