taking the vocals from a mix?

  • Thread starter Thread starter tylerxxx
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tylerxxx

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is it possible to take just the vocal track off of an already mixed song, to mix it with another song? if so, how do i go about doing it?
 
I don't think so.
The already existing song is a stereo file with no information about what individual tracks make it up.

UTSMAN
 
It's certainly possible.

You'd have to get a hold of the original sessions to do it.

Which might prove tricky on many fronts. Could be costly, time-consuming, etc. involving covert operations, or simply going through traditional licensing channels which would no doubt be quite expensive.
.
 
There is filtering you can do to attempt to notch out the vocals by lowering certain frequencies in the center, but this won't take out the vocals completely (if barely at all) and it will affect everything else in the song too....
So in short, no you can't cleanly take out vocals from a commercial CD.
 
chessrock said:
It's certainly possible.

You'd have to get a hold of the original sessions to do it.

Which might prove tricky on many fronts. Could be costly, time-consuming, etc. involving covert operations, or simply going through traditional licensing channels which would no doubt be quite expensive.
.
Click to expand...


hehe, well i know that. i was hoping to get the vocal track from an already mixed, commercial song, and throw it on top of another song as a joke. nothing i really NEED to do, so i doubt i will contact anyone. :D

thanks for the replies!
 
I have a plugin that I invented that does that, flawlessly.

I'll send it to you for 500 bucks.

.
 
you're a sneaky one. that deal is almost too good to be true!!
 
If the vocals are coming down the center of the pan space, they can be mostly removed, though how cleanly depends on the recording. There are devices and plugins for removing vocals under such circumstances. A quick Internet search should yield one or two results.

An alternative would be to do it manually. By coincidence, Tom V. at Mastering House just a week ago or so was kind enough to describe a technique in this forum for manually decoding a stereo signal into "mid" and "side" channels using standard multitrack editing software. Take a look in the "DIY Clinic #1" thread for more info on this. Using this method it shuld be possible to partially or fully isolate vocals that are riding right down the center of the stereo mix and remove them with as little harm to the rest of the signal as possible.

G.
 
Sign me up for the covert ops part :)

chessrock said:
It's certainly possible.

You'd have to get a hold of the original sessions to do it.

Which might prove tricky on many fronts. Could be costly, time-consuming, etc. involving covert operations, or simply going through traditional licensing channels which would no doubt be quite expensive.
.
Click to expand...
 
Guys, read the question. He wants to use the vocals in another mix, not remove them from an existing one.
 
i would have to remove them from the first mix, BUT i could care less about "damaging" the other parts of the song, haha
 
The manual M/S method I talked about would still do that, and even easier than removing the vocals altogether...again assuming the vocals were centered.

It's the same as isolating them and removing them, you're just elimating the whole "removing and recombining" half of the process. Use the M/S synthesis to isolate the center stuff to it's own track and then save that track as it's own WAV file.

That's still a long way to go for a <10-second sample, though.

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
If the vocals are coming down the center of the pan space, they can be mostly removed, though how cleanly depends on the recording. There are devices and plugins for removing vocals under such circumstances. A quick Internet search should yield one or two results.

An alternative would be to do it manually. By coincidence, Tom V. at Mastering House just a week ago or so was kind enough to describe a technique in this forum for manually decoding a stereo signal into "mid" and "side" channels using standard multitrack editing software. Take a look in the "DIY Clinic #1" thread for more info on this. Using this method it shuld be possible to partially or fully isolate vocals that are riding right down the center of the stereo mix and remove them with as little harm to the rest of the signal as possible.

G.
Click to expand...
If I'm not mistaken, aren't the bass, kick drum and snare usually panned down the middle as well? I have a vocal remover on my Roland VM-3100 Pro but it really sucks the bass out of the track.

Thomas
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trabalais said:
If I'm not mistaken, aren't the bass, kick drum and snare usually panned down the middle as well?
Click to expand...
Yes they often are. Hence my opening sentence with two caveats included:

"If the vocals are coming down the center of the pan space, they can be mostly removed, though how cleanly depends on the recording."

Only if the vocal is going down the center (not a given) and nothing else is (also not a given) can one cleanly pull out the vocals.

In fact while most recordings do have the low freq stuff like bass and kick near the middle, many of the better ones do offset them slightly. How cleanly those can be seperated depends upon the degree of offset.

But you're right, in most cases the extraction of the vocals is goingto be far from laser brain surgery and more like a lobotomy with a spoon ;).

G.
 
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