In these pages, I’ll explain the tools and techniques you can use to do this as well as is currently possible. Your chances of success depend on several factors, including: the nature of the source, what files and versions of the track are available how much money you’re prepared to invest, how much time it’s worth spending, and what quality of result is acceptable. I’ll start with the simplest approaches, using tools that are free/bundled with your DAW, before demonstrating the worth of increasingly sophisticated and costly software. You’ll find audio files to accompany the various examples on the SOS web site (see box). The first approach gives us separate control over any elements panned to the centre - that’s where the main lead vocal sound typically sits, usually alongside elements such as the bass, kick, snare and hi-hat - and those paned off-centre. The aim is to remove the vocal, leaving behind a usable backing track.
ACAPELLA EXTRACTOR. FREE
Underpinning it is the principle of phase-cancellation, as used by lots of free ‘vocal-removal’ plug-ins. You can do this entirely manually, by inverting the polarity of the left or right channel of your stereo file, but a more elegant approach is to convert the left-right (L-R) stereo file of your ‘source’ mix into Mid-Sides (M-S) stereo using a plug-in such as the freeware Brainworx bx_solo ( I’ll use that here. If your DAW doesn’t include a Mid-Sides processor plug-in, investigate Brainworx’s freebie bx_solo. One instance is used on the stereo ‘source’ track, and another on a duplicate. Import your stereo ‘source’ mix to a new track in your DAW, duplicate the track, and insert an instance of bx_solo on both the original and the duplicate. For one track, engage bx_solo’s ‘M solo’ (Mid solo) switch, so you only hear elements in the centre, and label that track ‘Mid’ for easy reference. For the other track, activate ‘S solo’ (Sides solo) and call it ‘Sides’. Next, solo the Mid track and apply an EQ cut spanning the main vocal. The exact frequencies depend on the nature of the vocal, but if in doubt start with a band centred around 2kHz, then experiment with the amount of cut and the Q (bandwidth). In the example, I ended up with a severe cut (-24dB) centred on 1.6kHz and a broadish (1.7) Q, to ‘scoop’ the vocal bits out of the Mid track. I also applied low-end and top-end boost to augment the kick, bass and hi-hats, as they’d been attenuated a bit along with the vocal.
This pretty much removed the vocal but left a chunk of the bass and kick intact.
With the M-S method, the ‘mid-only’ track may require pretty detailed EQ’ing to strike the optimum balance between reducing the vocal level and retaining the character of other elements in the centre of the mix. Having killed as much of the vocal in the Mid track as possible, play your Mid and Sides tracks together to hear your vocal free(ish) mix. The Sides track gives you a sense of the stereo image from the original track, while the EQ’d Mid track gives you bottom-end solidity. Unfortunately, other central sounds with higher frequency content (such as the snare or hi-hats) suffer as much as the vocal from this kind of EQ cut. To counter that, you can experiment with more complex EQ curves, with modest EQ boosts on the Sides track or, perhaps, a dynamic EQ (good if the snare is louder than the vocal) - the result will never be perfect, but you might improve it. Using this approach for my ‘sparse’ and ‘full’ mixes (see the ‘Audio Examples’ box) yielded interesting, albeit imperfect, results.
0 kommentar(er)
