PlaySA.net

Does anyone have the ability of taking the vocals out of the song or have an instrumental copy of the original (not a cover) that they could send me? Thanks

i'm going to say most likely not...

There's a fairly simple way of removing vocals from stereo tracks. It has to do with inverse wave forms and stuff (fun stuff to research, actually). Some of the cons, however, are that it can degrade the sound quality, and depending on how the song was mixed it might not work at all or might remove more than just the vocals.

I've found that it works decently for most of the SA song's I've tried it on. I went though a period where I edited nearly every song I listened to and removed the vocals so I could hear the guitars better, and the backup vocals! Max, at least in IARB, had TONS of backup vocals that I hardly noticed before, Alive with the Glory of Love being one of the best examples: every time he says "Yeaah!... Oh yeaaah!" there are three, maybe four, layers of max singing it, each with a different timbre and harmony, all under/behind his lead vocal.

Anyway. I'll post up a copy of Wow without the main vocals later. However, as I recall, the drums are pretty much crap sounding during the verses (simpler songs typically have worse results.)

Oh wow this was a while ago. I finally managed to get around to doing the song like I said. School and work have been keeping me way busier than I had hoped. Anyway here's Wow along with Alive and Baby Girl. Like I said before, Wow sounds pretty bad, but Alive and Baby Girl both turn out really great.

Wow: http://upload.team-ftm.net/7z39f/
Alive: http://upload.team-ftm.net/9EwEo/
Baby Girl: http://upload.team-ftm.net/wntbh/

How'd you do this? Like what software etc? It's bloody cool.

drugshavemymind wrote:How'd you do this? Like what software etc? It's bloody cool.

It's fairly simple, actually. I used Audacity (free software so you can try this yourself).

The song you use needs to be stereo in order for this to work. You import the song, split the left and right channels into separate tracks, then you set each track as a mono track instead of a left/right channel track. This will put the left and right channel both on the center, the song is now mono. Next, you have to select all of one of the tracks and apply invert it (Effect > Invert). That's about it.

If you want to know what's going on here scientifically, it has to do with wave interference, which is awesome. Most of what you hear in songs are panned a little left or right except, normally, the vocal track. This means every sound, between the left and right channels, are not symmetrical, but the vocal track is. This is important.
When you combine two waves (water, light, sound...) an interference pattern is created. Basically, two waves that are 3 feet high combine into one wave 6 feet high. If one of the waves is 3 feet deep and the other is 3 feet high, then they cancel each other out and yield 0 feet in either direction. For sound, this means silence.

When you split the left and right channels, all parts of the sound waves having to do with the vocal track are symmetrical, so when you invert one of the channels and play them at the same time, those parts of the sound waves are canceled out!

As I said, this might end up taking out a lot of your guitar or drum sounds as well, and if the vocal track has effects applied or is panned, it won't remove the voice. All this really does is remove all sounds that are perfectly centered. It also tends to bring out background noises/vocals.

Hope this helps!

That's a cool idea, I had Audacity, and then had to reset my laptop, I think I should play around with that, it would be pretty cool to do.