Removing lead vocal fro stereo mix?

lsdd · Post by **lsdd** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 12:08 pm

You know that "Karaoke Trick".....
I think I know how to do it...Just need to be able to do it quickly when I get home from work tonight..*(favour for a friend) I'm DP 4.61 btw....
Thanks
xxd

gregwhartley · Post by **gregwhartley** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 12:50 pm

From scratch? The only way I know how is to flip one channel out of phase with the other and then combine them both to center (mono), thus phase-negating anything originally panned to <c>. Obviously this only works with a stereo source. You'll still get the vox reverb tails in most recordings, and the bass and kick will mostly be gone but not much vox should prevail. EQ to taste afterwards and enjoy.

Greg

WSVP · Post by **WSVP** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 12:59 pm

You know that "Karaoke Trick".....
I think I know how to do it...Just need to be able to do it quickly when I get home from work tonight..*(favour for a friend) I'm DP 4.61 btw....
Thanks
xxd

Technically there is no way to do this without severely degrading the audio quality. In some cases this can be accomplished by isolating the fundamental vocal frequencies, inverting the waveform 180 degrees and summing it back into the mix, causing phase cancellation. This will (sometimes) remove most of the vocal track. However it will often remove other center panned instruments as well. In addition it makes a mess of the whole recordings quality.

The programming required to selectively remove a premixed audio signal from a song (without quality loss) is far beyond our current technology.

David Polich · Post by **David Polich** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 11:30 pm

I agree. Algorithms that "remove the lead vocal" from a stereo track also remove a lot of the other instruments that sit in the same range as the vocal.

Karaoke users - don't forget, they're clueless as to audio quality. (IMO, clueless in general). If you listen closely to a karaoke machine doing the "vocal removal" trick it will become painfully obvious that it sounds terrible.

lsdd · Post by **lsdd** » Fri Sep 08, 2006 7:01 pm

Oh yes...thats all true..

Infact , the degredation in the quality of the original mix ,overall, had me working on it all night!!

I took the file and copied it several times to different tracks stereo.
With the first track....I applied a low pass filter and used it with "Aptrigga" to retrigger a kick sample....

This was o.k. but still not good enough...So

I automated mutes ,in and out, between the original unphased stereo track channel (panned to mono as well, and the new phase canceld track channel so that when there was a lead vocal , I used the phase cancelled track and when it was instruments only, I went back to the original.

Still waiting to hear what it sounded like on a large PA system!( I mixed it very softly in the wee hours!! oh my!)

Due to the manic nature of the Musical material itself, I may have just gotten away with it....but stay tuned...We will find out shortly!!!

xxxd

gregwhartley · Post by **gregwhartley** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 8:20 am

Wow, that sounds like a pain in the ass! Very innovative though. Hope it turned out well for all the work you put into it!

Greg