Here's how you do it, although results will vary depending on how the song was originally recorded.
First of all, it has to be a stereo recording. The way voice/instrument cancelling works is it eradicates everything placed at the exact center of the stereo spectrum, leaving only left and right instrumentation/vocals audible. The technique usually reduces or eliminates the lead vocal along with lead guitar, bass guitar, kick and snare drums, anything mixed to the center.
Start by importing or recording your stereo file into Cool Edit. Then, on the two-track screen, highlight only the left or right channel and select Transform > Invert. This will reverse the phase of just that channel. Now highlight both tracks, go to the multi-track session screen and insert the song anywhere. Finally, do an Edit > Mixdown > All Waves Mono.
What this does is combine the two tracks out of phase and effectively cancels out whatever was common to the two (namely the centered audio information. If your song was a mono mix the whole thing will be gone, with a few bits of scratchy noise here and there.
Even if you got rid of the instrument/voice you were shooting for, you are likely to hear remnants of the missing audio -- most notably reverb -- because that effect is usually in stereo, bouncing all over the left and right and can't be eliminated totally.
If bass and drums are gone and you want them back, you can experiment with EQing some of the very deepest frequencies "out" of the track you plan to reverse phase on. This will reduce its commonality with the other track and cause some of the bass to stay when you combine them.
It won't work with every song. But you can often get pretty good results, especially you go back in and rerecord the missing instruments yourself.
Good luck,
Rick
jwai said:
Hi everyone,
I was trying to learn how to "minus one" a track. I've got it extracted from mp3 format to wave form and import it to cool edit pro 2.0. the whole song is in one track. i was just figuring out how to eliminate the lead guitar track from it. anyway to split the track into multiple tracks and edit it? or any way to lower the volume or something? any methods to "minus one" a track?
