Subject: Re: about separately recorded songs From: Pawel Kusmierek <p.kusmierek(at)NENCKI.GOV.PL> Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 12:31:20 +0200Hi, 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(at)nencki.gov.pl