Any Tricks for reducing vocals already mixed in.

[Ptron]

I have a bunch of stereo mixdowns of 4track stuff. The orginal 4 trk tapes are long gone. The mixes are o.k. except the vocals are too loud. I've tried cutting some select frequencies on a 31 band EQ but it tends to make the background music sound funny. Are there any good tricks for this?

 

[The Green Hornet]

Yo Ptron:

When you mix the vocals plus music onto either of the two stereo tracks, I don't think there is much you can do to reduce ONLY THE VOCALS. If you reduce the volume, you reduce the volume for the whole track and all that's on it.

You might try panning the tracks left/right and see if that will cut down on the intensity of the vocals; if you pan one track only you might get a positive result since the other track can carry the punch. I guess this all depends on what you have on a given track. That's all I can think of but maybe one of the Engineers can offer some solution.

Green Hornet

 

[BigKahuna]

This most likely isn't a workable solution as it will ruin your stereo mix. But those little boxes that remove vocals do it this way.
Flip the phase on the right channel and then pan both channels to dead center. The vocal (and probably bass) will drop in volume dramatically if they were panned near center in the original mix.
As I said, probably not what you're looking for. Oh well ... good luck anyway.

 

[Ptron]

The two tracks are simply a stereo mixdown of everything. The vocals are pretty much centered. I don't think there is much I can do. I just thought there might be some sneaky tips for reducing how much they stand out. The only thing I could think of was reducing the frequencies that the vocals stand out on, but they seemed to cut the impact of the music too much, defeating the purpose.

 

[Ptron]

I just saw your reply BigK. Interesting idea. It would probably screw up the overall sound way too much but I'll dink around with it anyway, just for fun.

 

[mrclay]

>reducing the frequencies that the vocals stand out on...

If you had access to the singer, here's an idea: Have him/her sing all the notes in the song (trying to EQ the voc as similarly as possible, and matching the tuning is important too) onto a .wav file. Use the CoolEdit 's noise reduction and get a noise profile of just that vocal. Save the profile (or just hit close) and apply noise reduction (w/ that profile loaded) to the old mixdown..

An easier way is to do the opposite: Take the whole song .wav and cut out all the sections with vocals. Now use that as your noise profile selection and applying it back to the whole song using the "keep only noise" setting.. This should do its best to keep all your music frequencies there and, assuming the vocal is different enough, should help to reduce it.