Creating Instrumentals

[KMoney]

When I try to remove vocals from a track and try to create an instrumental out of it-it's not working for me. I did the split stereo step; i highlighted the lower track and did the invert step; and i did the amplify step movin the meter to neg 4.2 and it didn't work for me. It messes up the beat, like distorts it and takes away certain elements of it, and then I still hear vocals. Also when I go back to check the amplify level, it's at a positive level. Can somebody tell me what I'm doing wrong. Thanks for all help!

[kozikowski]

There is an instruction page for this. Audacity has a vocal removal tool, you don't have to go through all that reversing/splitting business.

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Vocal_Removal

However.

There are some strict rules for Vocal Removal and most songs fail. You can't use many heavily compressed MP3 files -- many downloads fail from compression damage (it sounds like that's what you have).

The singer has to be in the exact middle of the sound field left to right. The show has to be in good quality stereo. Everything in the middle with the singer goes, too, frequently the bass and drums. The system leaves vocal effects like echo and reverb behind, even though the voice may be gone.

So your experience is probably normal. More songs fail than succeed. Try the Vocal Removal tool in Audacity and see if it works any better.

Go to this page and download the LRMonoPhase4.wav sound clip (it's short). If you apply Vocal Removal to it, the third section, the mono section will vanish. That proves you're using the tool right and you just have a bad song.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

Koz

[kozikowski]

One more. The output file is mono. It's not stereo any more. It may have two channels in the modern version, but they're the same show.

Koz