Raising volume of a certain instrument while lowing others

[Huehuehue]

Hai there,
I'm pretty new to the the forums and would like to say sorry if I'm in the wrong place, but basicly in Audacity how would you raise for volume of a certain instrument so you can say hear it much better then other instruments, but here's the catch, you know in some songs you have two guitars lets say lead1 and lead2, playing around the same frequency but want to separate the two guitars into seperate tracks while raising that certain guitar but lowing the other. I know it's possible.

E.G.

Lead 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Yb0z-yMbM
Lead 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wamHkj_r ... re=related

Any help is appreciated.

[kozikowski]

It's certainly possible if you start with a multi-track project -- each instrument on its own track. Then you can change the balance and placement of each instrument as you want. Then export a new mixed show with the changes in it.

You can't separate instruments once you make a mix.

There is one tool called Vocal Removal that can, in some cases, remove the lead singer from an orchestral mix, but that's it, and it fails on more songs than it succeeds.

There is one more way to do this. If you have a MIDI mix, you can export that into a music track and make a new track with a different mix any time by changing the MIDI construction.

I know it's possible.

How do you know that?

Koz

[steve]

The way that we do it in the studio is that one guitar is on one track and the other guitar is on another track. Raising or lowering the level of one track is then a trivial task. Unfortunately it is not the same when dealing with a recording that has been mixed down into a single mono/stereo track. in this case you have tools such as the Equalizer (can be useful for instruments that have different frequency content), the Envelope Tool (useful if the instruments do not overlap) and the "Vocal Removal" effect (can be useful if the instruments have different pan positions in the stereo mix). What we don't have is a magic "unmix me" button.

[DVDdoug]

I can't watch the video right now, 'cause I'm at work.

But, I can tell you that this is generally not possible. Of course, if one guitar is in the left and the other is in the right, you can adjust the channels separately. (Or, if you have digital surround, you can isolate all of the channels.) And, there is a "vocal removal" effect that subtracts left from right to remove the "center" channel. And, there are tools to extract the center-only, but these don't give you a "quality" result.

In the recording studio, everything is recorded multi-track with each voice/instrument on a separate track. Before mixing (and during mixing) you can process & adjust the tracks separately, or you can re-record or delete an instrument or vocal, etc. If you have access to the multitrack recording you can do the same thing at home.

But once the song is mixed, You can't un-fry and egg or un-bake a cake, and you can't un-mix a song.

Same thing with live sound... You can adjust all of the mixer-channels individually, but once the sound comes out of the mixer you can only process everything together (EQ etc.).

[kozikowski]

You forgot "unchocolate a brownie."

Koz

[Huehuehue]

Ah I see thanks guys, and when I said, "I know it's possible", the following two video's were from the same song but from the two different guitars, he also manged to do drum and keyboard versions from the original song, so he didn't play the instruments or anything he got the mp3 and done something with it which managed to raise the volume.