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Quickest way to Eliminate Vocals?

T

tlkshowhst

Member
Hey guys, need some of your precious advance yet again. I have a client coming in who wants me to take out vocals in a couple of songs. I know that this is possible, but I haven't done this before in my studio. I want to preserve as much quality of the original as possible minus, of course, the lead vocals. Suggestions?

Thanks!
 
C

cAPSLOCK

Active Member
Bring the singers ex boy/girlfriend into the vocal booth? ;) Oh, I spose if you had access to the multitrack you could just mute the channel...

But I am sure you want to remove vocals from an existing mix.

Doing this well is like removing any specter of pedophilia from Michael Jackson's reputation. In other words... it's pretty hard to do.

There is various software, and hardware (alesis makes a little box that does it). So this would likely be easiest.

The basic function in all vocal removal techniques is converting to mid/side then eliminating (or reducing greatly) the mid channel. The trick is to flip the polarity of the mid channel and mix it with the side channel. Once this is done you conver back to r/l stereo. Other than that it is all a matter of EQ settings to try to get the effect right. Just be careful with bass and space. By this I mean you have to realize that doing this M/S technique can adversly affect the bass and low mids, and even the highs to some extent. You might want to roll off what you dont want to cut on either side of the vocal range on the mid channel before mixing the two channels.

As to the space part: You have to also realize that drastically reducing the mid channel will make the mix's overall stereo image wildly out of phase. It will no longer sum to mono well. So you might want to reduce the stereo image on the mixdown to compensate for this.

Here is a decent article on the manual technique I just found with google (a good tool here on the net ;) )

http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.n ... enDocument

good luck,
cAPS
 
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