Removing Vocals From Audio Tracks (For TechTV.com)
October 7, 2007 by Colin FairbairnEvery budding musician or DJ at some point has to wonder if it’s possible to remove vocals from a song. And to an extent, it is. There are currently a few ways to go about this, and each works with varying results depending on the song and how it’s produced.
The Easy Way:
If you just want to remove the vocals from MP3s, you may want to try Vocal Remover, which is a plug-in for the popular, free Winamp player. You can download it for free from the plug-ins section of Winamp.com. Another excellent option is Analog X’s Vocal Remover, also for Winamp, which can be downloaded for free. Analog X also offers another version of Vocal Remover that can be used with any audio editing or sequencing application that supports Direct X plug-ins. The hard way: It is possible to manually remove vocals from a track, but it requires a lot of hard work and experimentation. Vocal removers work by reversing the phase of one channel in a stereo mix. This cancels all the sounds in the center of the mix, so not only does it usually cancel the vocals, but instruments like the bass, snare and kick drum, or anything else that is panned to the center. Often, the vocals will have effects on them for ambience, and these effects may not have been panned to the center so you may still hear them. Careful use of parametric EQ can help this, but it takes a good ear and lots of patience. The vocals are usually in the mid-range of the mix, around 1 KHz. EQ can remove them, but it will also cut other mid-range instruments, such as the guitar or a snare drum.
Conclusion:
Unfortunately, there is no magic software application that will automatically remove all of a vocal. The programs mentioned above generally do a good job, but don’t be surprised if you can still hear faint vocals in the background. We hope this helps.