quote:

Plur dug this one up for us

from my good friends at beat-boot-ique... man i miss them. HERE is the direct link (although you must be logged in to view). also for great diy (do it yourself) acapellas and instrumentals please visit GYBO (Get Your Bootleg On)... to get the full benefit of the site it is best to become a member.

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Making Acapellas

1. THE PHASE CANCELLATION METHOD
Get an instrumental of a song, invert the phase (sometimes referred to as flipping), and mix it with the original.. If done right everything besides the vocal is canceled out. You can do this in any sequencer like cubase or acid.. The instrumental must be exactly the same time/pitch however. and mp3s might not work if they are badly encoded. Zoom right in to see the 2 waveforms next to each other (look for kick drum hits) and line them up.

2. THE KNOCKOUT METHOD
using 'knock0ut' you can spectrally subtract one piece of audio from another. Start by extracting the center mono of a track (soundforge or cooledit will do it with the pan/expand feature). then try and make an instrumental out of loops from the track and 'knock them out' of the vocal parts. This can work even if the instrumental isn't exactly the same as the song.
http://www.freewebs.com/st3pan0va/

3. OTHER METHODS
Besides these methods you can try Cool edits (now audition) noise reduction feature, which is very powerful. Analyse a bit of instrumental and get a profile (6000 or 4096FFT is a good size).. reduce than from the whole song.
You can also try the soundhack spectral plugins and Voxengo's Transmodder to further reduce spiky nosies like drums.. (don't ask me how .. its all trial and error).


You will NEVER make a totally perfect acapella with 2 and 3. You can however make something good enough to work in your mix

SOUND FORGE

Fortunately, Sound Forge has a special Mid-Side conversion feature (normally used for another purpose) that pretty much makes this process automatic. Without it, the process would be much more involved (ie. having to remove the vocal first, converting to mono, phase inverting, and recombining with a mono version of the original file).

Here's how to do it the easy way in Sound Forge:
1 ) Open the original audio file.
2 ) Choose Edit;Select All to select all the data in the file.
3 ) Choose Process;Pan/Expand.
4 ) In the Pan/Expand dialog box, choose the Normal Mix Of MS Recording preset.
5 ) Click OK.
6 ) Choose Edit;Selection;Set.
7 ) Choose Left in the Channel parameter drop-down list.
8 ) Click OK.
9 ) Choose Edit;Copy.
10 ) Choose Edit;Paste Special;Paste To New.
11 ) Save your new audio file.

Depending on the type of material that you're processing, the results will vary, but they'll never be perfect. Anything that was in the middle of the mix will now be in your new audio file, which probably includes the vocal, bass, and some of the other background instruments. You can try to tweak the mix a bit with EQ, but other than that, what you get is what you get.


Another Program That Produces Various Results http://mp3-player.audio4fun.com/mp3-music-editor.htm#

And For Adobe Audition (Cool Edit Pro)
effects;amplitude;channel mixer;vocal cut


DVD Acapella Extraction.

You need to acquire some software

DVD Shrink (Freeware)

Vobrator (Freeware)

SoftEncode (Not free but theres a demo available)

ac3 Tools (Get the ac3 tools pro demo)


1. First up use DVD Shrink to back up your DVD to the hard drive. You should do this with all your disks in case the original gets damaged.




2. Next use VOBrator to extract the VOB audio channels. Only the main track on this dvd is Dolby 5.1, shown highlighted in the picture.

Click Demux to extract the separate files, and get the ac3 audio file.




3. Open the ac3 file (The blue one in the picture) with soft encode or AC3 Tools Pro.




Congratulations, you now have 6 channels of separate audio to save as .wav and use as you please.


The center channel is nearly all vocal, the rear 2 channels are pure instrumental etc etc.

thanks for the post duck/plur, but I call your bluff.

all of those methods are fundamentally wrong, well, maybe not wrong but they assume something that is so fundamentally wrong.

They all assume vocals are centered, and nothing else is. I have never heard a song where this is true. Sure vocals 'generally' are centered, but instruments sit in the middle ground at times, as well as sweep from side to side. you will always get other sounds in the mix, as well as an overall 'flatness' to the vocal.

not to mention dc offset!

I had this to say in a previous post

"Music is a complex waveform, you can't pick and choose what to pull out. It's not like cropping a picture, it's more like trying to seperate the individual ingredients to a choc chip cookie after it's baked (flour, sugar, etc). it ain't gonna happen."


but I would love to hear a before/after sample of any of those examples, and I will gladly change my mind if they work.

i have never, never heard a 100% perfectly created diy acapella... but i have heard some pretty decent ones. once layed over another beat most imperfections will become undetected. there are many i could link to, but being at the office my time is limited. i will link to one that i actually used from divide & kreate who stripped the vocals from New Order's Blue Monday... here is what he had to say...

quote:

...not sure if there is a real acapella for this track... anyhoo this is a filtered acapella I made a few years ago from the remix maxi single released in '94 or so... it's pretty clean, there is some bleeding towards the end.

and here is the link... just click the play button.

hey plur,

I listened to the sample, not bad, starts to get funky sounding near the end. As stated, it is from a remix, so who knows how 'clean' the original was (i.e., perhaps it was an acapella begining to some extent, or at least a heavily stripped sample).

sorry, it's just the natural skeptic in me.

Very interesting topic anyway guys, thanks.

luca

I have worked in my "Wedding Party" with voice - accords. I think when you want to create a acapella - mix you can take a accords of the refrain or a strophe, loop it and fade it out in the transition. Over that you can play the next acapella song or loop there also a accord.

Important is that both songs are in the same key! Than the transition sounds that it is one song!

Listen to "Wedding Party". There I have done this.


When you want to lay instruments over the acapella - voices that goes in the direction of music production.
Than you better use a producer program like cubase or so. You must know the right accords of the played songs and lay them played with the instruments in other tracks over the voices. It is not useful to loop one accord of the acapella song, loop it in MM, Cubase or Nero and lay it over the voices. That sounds annoying, cause it don´t fits to the melody of the song!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DJ Mojito,