Creating accapellas????

[DotMatrix]

I read an article recently that lead me to believe that it is possible, using the correct filtering, to filter out everything from a track except the vocals, essentially creating an accapella from a complete tune.

Now I could be completely misguided here as it doesn't make sense to me that you could remove music without taking away elements of the vocals but if it is possible I would love to know where to start, and more specifically whether it is possible to do this using wavelab.

any suggestions???

[rounser]

I've done it successfully about three times, and failed about the same. You need two specific things though:
1) Track with the vocal.
2) Exactly the same track without the vocal.

CD singles sometimes have an instrumental version where it's otherwise identical. Then you phase invert one of them in an audio editor, and mix the two together. You're left with the difference, which is the vocal and usually a "ghost" of the rest of track mixed very quietly in the background (due to EQ and compression differences, probably).

It won't work if the BPM is different, because the mixing over the top needs to be sample-accurate. This is why you can't really do it off of vinyl; pressing and turntable speed irregularities will stuff up such attempts.

Good luck. Some people think it can't be done...it can, you just need these specific resources. I think there's a plugin recently announced on kvraudio called Knockout which is designed to make this process easier, such that it'll handle subtle timing differences for you.

[DotMatrix]

nice one cheers.

[Dave Elyzium]

WIcked advice :) Thanks alot!

[RDR]

I've done it successfully about three times, and failed about the same. You need two specific things though:
1) Track with the vocal.
2) Exactly the same track without the vocal.

CD singles sometimes have an instrumental version where it's otherwise identical. Then you phase invert one of them in an audio editor, and mix the two together. You're left with the difference, which is the vocal and usually a "ghost" of the rest of track mixed very quietly in the background (due to EQ and compression differences, probably).

It won't work if the BPM is different, because the mixing over the top needs to be sample-accurate, otherwise it won't work. This is why you can't really do it off of vinyl; pressing and turntable speed irregularities will stuff up such attempts.

Good luck. Some people think it can't be done...it can, you just need these specific resources. I think there's a plugin recently announced on kvraudio called Knockout which is designed to make this process easier, such that it'll handle subtle timing differences for you.

Dude, do you have a link to that plug-in? cant find it on KVR..

cheers

[rounser]

Download links and people talking about it here:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79546&highlight=kn0ck0ut
Never tried it though, so no idea how useful it is...

[loopdon]

u need the real waves i have heard, no mp3s....

[TechMouse]

u need the real waves i have heard, no mp3s....
Yeah, that would make sense - mp3s are always just an approximation of the wavs.

[tocsin]

If you don't have access to an instrumental, you can do it with a mix of EQ, sometimes noise reduction, channel converting, and playing with the sampling rate. Sometimes when the vocals are predominantly in the center of the mix, you can remove a majority of the other sounds without affecting the vocals with a channel converter. I've never gotten that to work perfectly though and, more often than not, find it doesn't help much. For isolating hip-hop vocals, the best results I've gotten are by dropping the sampling rate to 22.5khz, doing a heavy bass roll off, and boosting the mids around the vocal range. There will still be some chatter from the original track that may be noticable. But, for the most part, it works pretty well if you have no other means to grab the vocals.

[DotMatrix]

nice one that sounds alot closer, to what i was reading. cheers! ;)