Professional vocal removing from a song - need recommendations

M

MiAn

New member
Hi! Is there any professional records studio where I could send a song and ask to remove vocals (professionally)? May be someone had used any and can recommend? What would be the cost of such service?
 
You misunderstand the problem. There is no guaranteed method to do this. All the techniques we have depend 100% on how it was recorded. There are only two real techniques that work to some degree. One simply looks for things that are exactly the same on both channels - usually the vocal, but often the bass guitar too - these can then be removed to some degree, however, if the voice has effects on it, as many do, then these effects may not be the same on both channels, leaving the voice missing, but sitting in a 'hole' of reverb and effects. Early Elton John tracks are very typical. You can remove his voice but you leave in a cathedral like reverberation that prevents you using the track - it's like a ghost Elton. The other helpful feature is eq - as you can tweak the recording to do the null out trick above, but only in certain bands. You can buy software that does these things semi-automatically, but the success is down to the recording. How it was recorded in the studio. A voice centre, piano left and drums right would be pretty successful, but once you add compression, hard eq, effects and lots of sound sources, the success rate drops drastically. It's not a trick pro studios can do and amateur ones can't - it's just physics. There are now plug-ins that will reduce reverberation in a recording, something quite recent really, but none of the remove vocals techniques do it without damaging the quality of the track. They're often ghostly, with squashed bass and kick drum, and have some instruments missing, others made artificially loud. If you want to put up the track you want to use on a hosting site, and giving us the link, we'll have a listen and report back if you like? Some of us quite like fiddling with these.
 
Thank you for explanation. I have tried few online tools to remove vocal and it was exactly as you described "like a voice of a ghost". I just thought that there might be some professional studios that could get the song and create real minus one music in the same pitch, tempo and all the same but without "ghost voice". Is there any studios that could provide such service?
There was a song that I wanted to sing with my daughter on the Halloween party but couldn't find the good minus one track and all what I could make myself had a "ghost voice" in the background. I would love to share the track here just to check if anyone could try to do something with it but still can't publish any links as I am new on this forum and "need to have few posts".
 
I'd give up - this one has mega prominent vocals, lots of processing and multiple voices all panned slightly apart from centre, so all the usual techniques will fail. Re-recording is what I'd do faced with this one - it's just not an appropriate product for nulling. Loads of us could re-create this one, but how much would a couple of days work be? How much do you consider it worth?
 
It would be worth trying Izotope's RX 7 Music Rebalance feature. My demo version has timed out otherwise I'd try it and let you know if it worked but it was amazingly good at isolating vocals - far better than the other techniques mentioned so far.
 
Mostly echoing what's been said.
As you found out software exists for "removing" vocals but, more often than not, some trace is left.
I've no doubt you could hire a studio/engineer to make a backing track that's close to the original but keep in mind the time involved because rather than removing the the vocals they'd be re-recording everything else.
It's a short song, though; Maybe it wouldn't cost too much?

Being that it's Nov 1st, has the moment passed?
 
rob aylestone said:
Loads of us could re-create this one, but how much would a couple of days work be? How much do you consider it worth?
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What is the average price of such work? How is it usually done? I actualy was looking for some known relaiabe studio that could do it for me then send demo for review for example and then get payment. Something like this. :) I have few other songs that I would like to be re-created without vocals for my daughter to sing.
 
Steenamaroo said:
It's a short song, though; Maybe it wouldn't cost too much?
Being that it's Nov 1st, has the moment passed?
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yeh, for this particular song no rush anymore, we finally gave up the idea of singing it with such a bad quality track :) may be I will try to get it done properly for the next year. However, I have other songs that I would like to be re-created without vocals. So I am very intersted to find out about some studio where I don't have to go but just send the file and get the re-created track back, like I commented above. Any recommendations? or can it be done right here with the help of engineers on this forum? what's the avarage cost?
 
jamesperrett said:
It would be worth trying Izotope's RX 7 Music Rebalance feature. My demo version has timed out otherwise I'd try it and let you know if it worked but it was amazingly good at isolating vocals - far better than the other techniques mentioned so far.
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It would be great if it works!
 
jimmys69 said:
Find a site that has the songs you want or hire Steen to create them for you.

Karaoke Song, MP3 Instrumental Playback - Karaoke Version
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I use this site when possible, very good one. But not all the songs are available there, secondly, most of the times it is required to raise the pitch to be good for kids voice. When I raise pitch the quality of track gets lost. So the best way is to re-create the song and I was looking here for some advices about good and reliable stutios that can make it professionally and not too expensive. What's the average cost? :)
 
You know - that's a pretty good job TST. Wouldn't be too much work to put back in the bits and pieces that were 'glued' to the vocals, but quiet usable like it is. Nice one!
 
TSTstudios said:
This is the best I could do I, hope it works for you :)
WeTransfer
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Very good job! Thank you very much! eah... it's a pity I found this forum too late this year and we missed the oportunity to sing at the Halloween party already :) But I will save this for the next year. This quality is really pretty much enough for a song at the school performance. what tools did you use to remove vocals? :thumbs up:
 
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