Just something I've never been able to figure out. How do they remove the vocals on KARAOKE music?
Does anyone know?
I thought it might be to filter out certain frequencies, I tried that on an audio processor, and it dont work. The instruments use some of those same freqs. My only other guess is that the recording companies record the vocals separately and they create the karaoke versions, but there are karaoke titles for some oldies music, which was recorded long before karaoke was even heard of...
Google didn't find anything, except lots of karaoke equipment and songs for sale.
On Sunday 13 January 2013 11:38 snipped-for-privacy@home.com wrote in alt.home.repair:
No a sound studio expert, but I'm pretty sure everything is on seperate tracks. The studio would just mix a karaoke version using everything but the vocals.
Haven't tried this but heard that the 'central' voice in most stereo is simply added equally to LEFT and RIGHT channel, thus to remove simply make the music L-R
Music is usually recorded on tracks so it's easy to edit or mix. For example you can have a voice on one track, guitar on another and drums on a third. This allows each track to be individually managed or omitted. If it helps any, think of each track as a microphone recording one instrument or voice then mixed together. Of course you can have a track record groups of stuff too. I've seen music labelled as black boxes where it's the real thing minus voices and was told it's usually for broadcasters.
There are hardware devices and software programs that allow you to do it. I've used a program called Adobe Audition. It's not cheap but works very well, especially if the vocal is equally divided between the
2 channels. There is probably a freeby out there, but I haven't looked. Search for Vocal Zapper for both hardware and software. I did it for a friend that was singing for a wedding. They had a CD of the singer/songwriter doing a number which was requested by the bride. However, it was never published as sheet music for someone to accompany the singer ... short of hiring the original singer/songwriter to gig the wedding. I removed the main vocal with Audition, which was very easy. All that was left of the original vocal was a small amount of the vocal hidden in the remaining reverb. When singing to the modified CD which I made, you couldn't hear that small amount of the original vocal. And, I realize that it was probably illegal on some level to do that, but when the bride calls, you do as requested.
When they make music, each separate instrument can be on a separate "channel" as well as voice. Then they can "redo" just one instrument if it is not exactly right. Or just "redo" to voice part, etc.
Anyway here is an image of a music recording program called "Cakewalk". Notice they are using 14 separate channels, one for each instrument. Voice could be added to yet another channel. Or easily taken away.
formatting link
To to remove voice from a song, you would need access to the master recording (still has many separate channels) as well as the software used to put it all together.
*From the few times that I have seen and heard Karaoke it seems that the music is not from the original recording artist that made the song famous. The music sounds as though it was made by other musicians. I surmise that this is done to avoid royalty payments.
However as others have said, professional music tracks are recorded separately and then mixed by engineers to get the optimum sound with the various instruments and vocals put together. It would be no big deal to create a music only version since it was recorded separately.
For professional Karaoke releases, I'm sure they just turn off the track that has the main vocals.
To remove the lead vocal from existing music, the typical method is to remove audio that appears equally on the left and right channels. With most music, the instrumental parts tend to be mixed slightly to the left or right channels, while the vocals are "centered" equally on the left and right. There are a variety of hardware devices and software applications that can do this for you.
Re oldies music. Below are a couple of Freeware apps for "vocal removal". Both have explanations of how their programs work (and both note that their techniques don't always work).
Voice on most recordings are center, mono. That's in phase with left and right. So, you can subtract that, with the out of phase music sounds cannot be phased out. you will often hear remnants of voice anyway.
On 13 Jan 2013, snipped-for-privacy@home.com wrote in alt.home.repair:
Most commercial karaoke music is re-recordings, with people or synthesizers duplicating the original performance, minus the vocal of course, Some of this is quite faithful to the record, but you can usually tell that it's not, either by the performance or the sound quality.
This isn't used much for commercial karaoke, but you might be thinking of this: there is a technique called "OOPS" (meaning [O]ut [O]f [P]hase [S]tereo. You reverse the polarity of one of the stereo channels, then sum the whole thing to mono. This results in everything shared equally by both channels - which is usually the lead vocal and bass - to disappear. However, anything even slightly off-center will still be heard to various degrees - that includes reverberation. The end result is that the bass usually is gone, and the main vocal is mostly gone, but you will still hear ghost traces of it.
It would be possible for the producers of the original records to create special karaoke mixes of their records that include the original instruments, but that eliminate the vocals. I don't know for sure, but I think this is rare.
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