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Posted by Luke Cartwright on Nov-19-2004 19:46:

Removing Vocals

I have been trying to remove vocals from tracks and have downloaded a few programs and plug-ins along the way. None of them work too good atm though.

I have read that it is impossible to fully remove vocals from some tracks due to the way they are structured and layered, I'm not too bothered about losing some of the main parts as I can work on that afterwards.

I have downloaded a plug-in for sound forge called analogX vocal remover which is the best so far. But it seems like it is doing the process the other way around, removing the main part of the track and just then playing the vocals and bassline.

Do I have some settings to change in soundforge or are there any other good programs/plug-ins that anyone has used to kill vocals.

Also I have seen a seperate piece of kit called the alesis vocal zapper, anyone know anything about this and if it actually works.

Posted by wee_rooney on Nov-19-2004 21:46:

sorry i dont have a clue!

but i have another question that kinda relates to it.
can you get any programs that will do it the other way round, ie. remove the backing track to leave you with an acapella?

im really wanting an acapella of the kinda breakdown bit of killers - all these things that i've done.

cheers

Posted by DannyO on Nov-19-2004 22:06:

The best way I know of with removing vocals is, find the accapella of it, then there is some way of getting Sound Forge (I Think) to use the accapella as a guide to remove the vocals from the original, it works by looking at the frequency's of the accapella and then removing those exact frequency's from the original, but you have to have the exact same vocals as the track your taking out of.

As for taking out background music to make an accapella, this is easier, but depends on the track, I know its possible but dunno exactly how, depending on the track I can remove pretty much all the background sounds of some tracks using my mixer, the vocals become alittle high and lose there low end, but when you drop them over another track, it sounds pretty good.

Posted by mezzir on Nov-20-2004 03:36:

quote:
Originally posted by DannyO
The best way I know of with removing vocals is, find the accapella of it, then there is some way of getting Sound Forge (I Think) to use the accapella as a guide to remove the vocals from the original, it works by looking at the frequency's of the accapella and then removing those exact frequency's from the original, but you have to have the exact same vocals as the track your taking out of.

As for taking out background music to make an accapella, this is easier, but depends on the track, I know its possible but dunno exactly how, depending on the track I can remove pretty much all the background sounds of some tracks using my mixer, the vocals become alittle high and lose there low end, but when you drop them over another track, it sounds pretty good.

yeah, you can phase cancel if you have the a capella and the regular track
never done it but seen it done, sometimes comes out decently

and as for the making a capellas from regular tracks?
well i believe that most of what those plugins do is just EQ them to hell
and yeah, if you just use your own program to EQ them till you get most other sounds out of the track, then just add in a lil artificial bass and whatnot, and it'd probably sound fine if layed over something else

Posted by mezzir on Nov-20-2004 04:22:

and since i was bored, i took that track and tried my damndest
taking out the full chorus is fucking impossible
trying to remove a full gospel chorus from snares, guitars, other guitars, symbals, and other stuff just seems really fucking impossible
good luck thought!

Posted by Tranc3 on Nov-20-2004 04:44:

Uhhh....if you already have an a capella, why would you waste your time with phase cancellation to get another a capella?

Wait...are you interested in getting vocals as a final product, or an instrumental as a final product?

Posted by DannyO on Nov-20-2004 05:08:

quote:
Originally posted by Tranc3
Uhhh....if you already have an a capella, why would you waste your time with phase cancellation to get another a capella?

Wait...are you interested in getting vocals as a final product, or an instrumental as a final product?

The first guys asking how to make an instrumental, and the second guys asking how to make an accapella, to make an instrumental, you can do that by having the accapella of the track you want to make into an instrumental.

Posted by Luke Cartwright on Nov-20-2004 11:45:

quote:
Originally posted by mezzir
yeah, you can phase cancel if you have the a capella and the regular track
never done it but seen it done, sometimes comes out decently

and as for the making a capellas from regular tracks?
well i believe that most of what those plugins do is just EQ them to hell
and yeah, if you just use your own program to EQ them till you get most other sounds out of the track, then just add in a lil artificial bass and whatnot, and it'd probably sound fine if layed over something else

Thanks for the info guys, I have a few accapella's I could try it with but what is this phase cancel you are talking about, I have soundforge 6 is it anywhere in there.

Posted by tu_face on Nov-20-2004 11:54:

it is very very very very hard to do this without the finished product sounding shite, because when you remove the frequencies of the voice, you are also removing similar frequencies from the music. some karaoke machines do it, but again its usually a ery poor end result in terms of sound quality.

Posted by Derivative on Nov-21-2004 02:01:

explanation of phase cancelation:

if you have 2 sampled sounds around similar frequencies playing at the same time, you can reverse the polarity of 1 of them to put it in opposite phase. all frequencies that that are in phase and (180 degrees) out of phase cancel out. this means they dont sound so you get the sound of 1 and only a little bit of the other. if those 2 sounds were identical and shared identical frequencies then putting one of them 180 degrees out of phase would cancel out the entire sound.

you can use this trick to get instrumental tracks if you have an accapella of that track. you go into soundforge and you open the full track. open the acapella and line it up as best you can with the vocals from the full track. you really have to be spot on or else it'll fuck up. once its exact, reverse the polarity of the acapella and render the whole thing. most of the vocals should be removed because of phase cancelation.

this is never perfect because:

vocals commonly have reverb effects and phase modulation effects on them (i.e. flangers, chorus effect, phasers etc). reverb plugins alter the phase of a sound to make it sound further away from you (which is a weird property of changing phase). its not possible to remove vocals completely from a track where phase modulation effects are used because moving sound out of phase and reversing polarity wont cancel out all the sound because all of the sound wont be exactly 180 degrees out of phase.

in simpler terms, if its swamped in reverb, this trick wont work very well.

Posted by GT357 on Nov-21-2004 22:37:

buy a keyboard and play it yourself.

Posted by DJ_Hailstone on Nov-23-2004 18:34:

Well, my friend told me that Cool Edit has a vocal-cut function. You should try it.

Posted by cheesy on Nov-24-2004 19:37:

Basically you need a parametric EQ, where you can select which frequency you want to adjust, and how much you want to adjust it. Completely cut the EQ, then sweep the frequency until most of the vocals are gone. Of course if there are other instruments in that frequency range they'll get cut too.

Try asking the guys in the production forum, they would probably know more.

Posted by Derivative on Nov-24-2004 23:58:

parametric EQs dont cut frequencies completely - they allow you to increase or decrease the presence of a frequency/frequency range by increasing or lowering the line level of that specific frequency/frequency range.

its important to note that for instance, a kick drum doesnt just sit between 50 and 500 hz. it actually consists of pretty much every audible frequency (and some inaudible too). on a spectrum analyser most of its presence is around 50 to 500 hz though. but theres bits of it way up to 20,000hz too. same with vocals, same with any synth. they have most of their presence is a specific range but they really occupy pretty much every audible frequency to some extent or other. completely cutting a frequency range (i.e. with a free filter) will, depending on the size of the range effect every other instrument in a song.

vocals generally have alot of mid range presence (because mid range is where most speech recognition occurs), alot of upper mid range presence, some top end and a little bit of bass end to it. completely cutting all of that that will seriously fuck up every other instrument in the rest of the track.

Posted by nrjizer on Nov-25-2004 00:07:

If all else fails, you can take a portion of the tune without vocals and simply edit it so it loops that portion constantly, where the vocals would otherwise be.

Posted by eyeball_2003 on Nov-26-2004 14:56:

Re: Removing Vocals

quote:
Originally posted by Luke Cartwright
I have been trying to remove vocals from tracks and have downloaded a few programs and plug-ins along the way. None of them work too good atm though.

I have read that it is impossible to fully remove vocals from some tracks due to the way they are structured and layered, I'm not too bothered about losing some of the main parts as I can work on that afterwards.

I have downloaded a plug-in for sound forge called analogX vocal remover which is the best so far. But it seems like it is doing the process the other way around, removing the main part of the track and just then playing the vocals and bassline.

Do I have some settings to change in soundforge or are there any other good programs/plug-ins that anyone has used to kill vocals.

Also I have seen a seperate piece of kit called the alesis vocal zapper, anyone know anything about this and if it actually works.

sorry i cant help but just out of interest.. why do u want to do this?

Posted by Derivative on Nov-26-2004 15:59:

so you can make instrumentals out of songs where you dont like the vocals or, even better, if you have the instrumental an the original song you can cancel phase and get an acapella. quite alot of the acapellas on the net are made using this method.