Removing vocals from a music track

[thewhirlwind]

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?

[steve h]

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

[MarkPAman]

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.

[Rob_Beech]

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.

[Shez]

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.

[steve h]

cool...just wondering!