Re: about separately recorded songs

[Pawel Kusmierek <p.kusmierek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

although I cannot provide you with seperate tracks of vocal+instrumental
recordings, I can offer you a few leads which hopefully will be helpful.

As you probably know, the simplest method of removing vocals from a
typical song is to invert phase of one stereo channel and mix both
channels together. Ideally, what was mixed into the centre of soundstage
(typically, vocal) should be cancelled out, whereas the remainder will be
relatively unaffected. The results are typically not very good in terms of
sound quality and you get only full version and instrumental-only version
(no vocal-only). However, the newest version of Adobe Audition (v.1.5)
uses a more advanced technique (called Centre Channel Extractor or
something like that) which is said to be more flexible and give better
results than the aforementioned simple Vocal Cut.  You may want to use it
to prepare separate tracks. Another novel feature of Audition 1.5, the
Frequency Space Editing, might be also helpful. This feature allows
selecting a portion of sound in both time and frequency domains (i.e., you
select a rectangle on a spectrogram) and apply processing to this portion
only.  Unfortunatly, I still have version 1.0 only, which lacks these
useful features. Therefore, I cannot provide my personal opinion how do
they work.


The other solution is to get access to original separately recorded
tracks. Digging through a recording studio trash can could be fruitful
:-). This is probably not easy not only because these days trash cans are
computer based recycle bins, but due to copyright issues. However, if you
could contact a small recording studio and hire musicians you could get
separate tracks in this way. With amateur or semi-amateur musicians this
would be probably not very expensive.  Also, Audition 1.5 comes with a few
example sessions (i.e., multi-track recordings). Again, I have no idea
what do they contain, v.1.0 came with a lot of loops (single track
examples) but no example sessions.

I would suggest asking your question on one of the Audition/CoolEdit
(CoolEdit was the Audition's name before it was taken over by Adobe)
forums: either the independent AudioMasters forum
(http://audiomastersforum.org/amforum/index.php) or the Adobe-run forum on
Adobe website. (BTW, both forums are in general visited by the same site,
so asking on both forums is probably of little use).  There are people
working in small recording studios at these forums and they may offer you
better suggestions than I did.

It might seem from the above that I am advertising Audition.  I must
stress that I am not an Adobe representative, I am just a happy user of
CoolEdit and Audition. There are obviously other multitrack sound editing
programs which offer probably similar capabilities (although they are
probably more expensive, and, to my knowledge, Centre Channel Extractor
and Frequency Space Editing are available only in Audition).  There is
also a free multittracking solution: Audacity
(http://audacity.sorceforge.net).  You may find Audacity or Audition
useful to mix your tracks in various combinations as soon as you get these
tracks.

Good luck,

Pawel



--
Pawel Kusmierek
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology
ul. Pasteura 3
02-093 Warsaw, Poland
phone: (+48 22) 58 92 388
fax: (+48 22) 822 53 42
email: p.kusmierek@nencki.gov.pl