I've no experience of this, so this at least will help me to understand this topic a bit better!

How do you go about removing vocals from a music track make it into a backing track? Is it possible? I can't think of a way to do it but have had an enquiry from someone who wants to remove the vocals from a track and send that to a PA while sending the full track to the singers IEM system - is this possible though - obviously I know how to technically send the signal to each system but not how to process the track!

Let me know your thoughts etc, I look forward to finding out more!

Thanks,

Dan

You can't. You can do something approaching it to a recording by inverting the left track and superimposing it on the right. There will be some cancellation of things panned dead centre, like the lead vocal and maybe drums. But it WILL sound nasty!

There's no reliable way to do this and certainly no solution I'd try to use in real time.

Quite a few bits of audio software offer methods that attempt to do this, all using basically the same theory. Most commonly when a mix is done, the lead vocal is panned dead centre while backing vocals and instruments are panned varying degrees of left and right.

If the lead vocal IS dead centre, inverting one channel and combining it with the other one will result in cancellation of anything identical in both tracks (I.e. things panned centrally) while not affecting--at least not too much--things which are different in the left and right tracks.

Just occasionally this can work really well but more often there are problems. First, ANYTHING panned centrally suffers the same cancellation so, for example, you often lose a lot of bass and kick drum. Similarly, even though the vocal may be central, quite often a stereo reverb is applied so you're left with a ghostly reverb tail missing it's track. I'm sure you can visualise all the other things that can go wrong.

If you want to have a play, Adobe Audition does as good a job as any and lets you play with EQ etc. as well as the basic cancellation (though not in real time obviously) and is avaiable on a downloadable 28 day trial. However, I wouldn't promise anything to the person who wants this. Most likely, it won't work.

Bob

You can't................... Usually.



Have a search as this has been covered many times before. There are things you can try, but the result is normally poor.

Sorry if you didn't want sugar in your tea. You can always take it out again



Edit: Too slowwwwwwww

I have to admit I didn't think that you could do this!

I do know of a couple of backing track cd's that having backing only on the right track and have the vocals on the right track, therefore if you want to only have the backing track you just pan left but I don't know how readily availble these are - does anyone else?

I did try searching the forum before I posted this tpic and didn't find any relevant info - sorry!

building on your idea of the separate left and right tracks, maybe you could find backing tracks of the song, then record their vocals over the top, but as you said only on the left channel? then on the desk route the left channel to their iem and the right to foh?

edited to remove genderisation. swear you said it was a she in the first post...

The closest I ever got was the "Remove Vocals" favorite on the old Cool Edit Pro (now Audition 1.5) but it was pretty lame.

My guess is you'll either have to re-record it as a multitrack...

Go to a Karaoke store and look for a MULTIPLEX track of the song required. multiplex karaoke songs have a track with vocal on one side and a track without vocal on the other so then you send left and right audio where you need. I have used EMKaraoke in Nottingham for thir huge catalogue before check before ordering.

OT, but if you want to have some fun, have a play with the "Centre Channel Extractor" in the current version of Audition (now 3.01 but the extractor first appeared in 2.0). It still can't work miracles but can do a lot more than even the old Cool Edit vocal remover.

Bob

Are there any legality issues around removing the singers from a copyrighted recording with the intention of performing the result in public?

Of course there are!
It's exactly the same as using the original, but also enters into the realms of neededing specific permission as you are manipulating somebodies copyright material. In general, as the results are so unpredictable, it's probably that nobody would realise what you had done, just thinking it sounded 'weird'. People who do recognise the characteristic hollowness of psuedo backing tracks will just sigh.

So should the BR be advocating doing it?

We're not. We've been advising that yes, it can be done with varying rates of success, depending on source material, and that certain well know pieces of software will do it - as will the button on karaoke machines.

Nobody has promoted it's use, quite the opposite.

Fair enuff.

It is fair enuff (sic) yes.

It has not been mentioned that there IS any copyright on the material. For example it may be a solo singer who used to play in a band who wrote their own material and they wished to use a studio track of theirs for their backing track. Sadly there was no multitrack recording available, just the finished mix.

Secondly, then I record things, I always have a lead vocal track with a substantial stereo effect (that doesn't really alter the overall sound much, and then pan it as far as I dare one way for a bit, and then the other. I can't think of a time that anyone will have needed to remove the vocals from a track I've mixed, but I can rest assured that if ever they do, they'll struggle.

I remember a friend of mine having a alesis vocal eliminator or something similar.
It was quite a while ago and he only gave me a quick demo of it but from memory
it seemd to work quite well.
Anyone have any experience of these?

I will point out this is pure theoretical thinking on my part. But I was wondering whether with all inverting one side of the stereo track and all that, could you get a better result if you took an acapella version of the track and inverted that on it. Something like here do them for free!

Steve

That would work if the acapella version you used was actually the the vocal track(s) from the original recording (and you could sync it up perfectly and it included the same effects, panning, eq............).

Otherwise no.

Marks point is very valid. I've not heard the tracks from that site, but if they are not the exact track used on the track you are trying to remove vocals from then it simply will not work. There is every chance (especially given they appear to be free) that they won't be. Also remember as Mark also points out.

This type of thing is likely to be DRY.

Also remember the mastering effects. These might not (most likely will not) be present on the acapella so multiband compression over the entire mix is going to "distort"* the signal you are trying to match.


*Not like a Guitar pedal, but just alter, though I wanted to use the word distort.

Plus those acapellas are MP3s. Trying to do any of that sort of processing with MP3s always ends messily. Someone once asked me to do a vocal removal on a track on a CD - I tried the old phase polarity reversal trick and the mess that was left resembled a 16k MP3... Compression hell.

cool...just wondering!