A capella

[nannaq]

hey, i have an a capella song (people that sings without using any instruments) and i would really like to take away some of the voices and listen to one specific voice... can anyone please help me??

[steve]

You can only do that if you have each voice recorded on its own track. That's one of the main reasons for making multi-track recordings - you can then deal with each track individually.

[nannaq]

how do i get each voice recorded on its own track?

[steve]

You can do it by either recording one voice at a time, or by using hardware (a sound card) that supports multiple inputs and use a separate microphone for each singer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitrack_recording

[nannaq]

so if they didn't do a multi-track recording on the CD, then i can't do it over?

[steve]

so if they didn't do a multi-track recording on the CD, then i can't do it over?

If you only have the stereo track of all the voices mixed together, then "extracting" one voice from the mix is like trying to separate the banana from a banana and pineapple milkshake. You may be able to achieve a very small degree of separation by filtering, for example, to bring out the lowest voice you could use Equalization effect to cut down the higher pitched voices a little, and raise the lower voice a little, but you will still have a lot of pineapple in your banana, and the result will sound rather mushy, so it's probably not worth the effort.

[Lacy]

if you only have the stereo track of all the voices mixed together, then "extracting" one voice from the mix is like trying to separate the banana from a banana and pineapple milkshake. You may be able to achieve a very small degree of separation by filtering, for example, to bring out the lowest voice you could use Equalization effect to cut down the higher pitched voices a little, and raise the lower voice a little, but you will still have a lot of pineapple in your banana, and the result will sound rather mushy, so it's probably not worth the effort.

Celemony's Melodyne can now seperate the banana and pineaple, in fact, it can seperate however many flavours you want to mix together. I have yet to try the latest release with DNA but the demo vid certainly looks impressive! Melodyne was always very good and natural sounding with it's pitch correction but now you can modify and edit polyphonic tracks which would, I assume, include vocal tracks.

http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna

[kozikowski]

<<<Coming Soon...find out when it will be available>>>

I always look for the magic words.

<<< edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material.>>>

Note it doesn't say edit individual performances, just individual notes. My guess is that it's still impossible, not because you can't do it at all, but because nobody is going to take the song apart note by note. My guess is this tool would be gold to someone who hit a few clinkers in the three minutes and needs to get the performance out the door.

Special for New Users: us$299.

Let us know how it comes out.

Koz

[steve]

It does indeed look impressive, and there have been occasions where I would have found such software very useful, but I notice that the demo is extracting notes from a chord from a track of one instrument, so it still requires a multitrack recording. Being able to pick out individual parts from a multi-instrument recording is something of a different issue.