Separating Vocals For Remixing Options

[Mr. Jason E. Lec...]

i have a song i am trying to clean up and remix for a friend of mine. his brother passed away and they have one recording of a song he wrote. it seems that it was simply a bedroom recording, but if it was multi-track, nobody knows, thus i don't have access to the separate tracks of vocals and instruments. i really want to help my friend and his family. so is there any way to somehow "bring out" the vocal tricks, or cut down the other tracks so i can achieve this?

[mortalengines]

You can get real surgical with some EQs (like a 4 to 8 band) and boost or cut certain frequencies at will. The other trick would be to try a Multi-band Compressor.

[Jim Hoyland]

If you have a suitable plug-in, try making a copy of the whole song file, then flip the left and right sides of the copy (so that the left side plays out of the right speaker and the right side out of the left).

You then need to reverse the phase of the copy - in ProTools pretty much every Digirack plug-in has phase switches (usually represented by a circle with a diagonal line).

When you run the original track with the channel and phase reversed copy, phase cancellation should remove a fair amount of the backing track.

I believe this technique is similar to the process undertaken by 'karaoke' software to strip a lead vocal from a backing track and also the old engineers' trick of reversing phase on control room speakers so that singers can record without headphones.

Best of luck with your project!

[Mr. Jason E. Lec...]

wow that's amazing! i always wondered how they did that with karaoke tracks. now i just have to find out if i have the tools for this switching and phasing stuff in ableton. anybody know?

[Mr. Jason E. Lec...]

okay, i'm not certain about the terminology or the typse of tools you're talking about in the phase switch scenario. i have a lot of plugins from audio damage and ohm force. would any of them do this? and in response to the note about using eq and compression, could you maybe be more specific about what settings/levels i would need to tweak. i'm more of a synth and drum programmer, not really an audio editor, so any way that can be explained to a novice in this situation would be helpful. like i said i have those plugins as well as a decent amout of others. i use ableton live 6.x and have everything that came in the box with it. any tips would be greatly appreciated.

[deaconblue]

There are some hints on how to accomplish this with compression and EQ in these documents about compression. Hope this helps to demystify it a bit.

peace