Re: about separately recorded songs (Brian Gygi )

Subject: Re: about separately recorded songs
From:    Brian Gygi  <bgygi(at)EBIRE.ORG>
Date:    Thu, 15 Jul 2004 09:55:53 -0700

At 09:50 PM 7/14/2004, Yipeng Li wrote:
>Dear list,
>
>I am a graduate student in the computer science and engineering
>department, the Ohio state university. Currently I am carrying out a
>project which is to extract the vocal line (singing) out of a song, i.e.
>to remove the backing music. In order to develop such a system, I need
>recordings where the vocal and music are separately recorded. e.g., the
>vocal is in one track and the music is in another track (different
>instruments are not necessarily separately recorded). For all the
>recordings I can found, the vocal and the music are mixed and then stored
>in different channels. Karaoke is not useful since in Karaoke, the music
>is stored in one channel and the mixture of vocal and music, instead of
>the vocal alone, is stored in the other channel. I heard that in modern
>pop music industry, every instrument as well as vocal line is separately
>recorded. They are mixed before the release. Since it is difficult for me
>to access this kind of resource, I am wondering if there are other ways to
>get the recordings.


If you can find them, old recordings from the 50s and 60s would sometimes
have the vocals in one channel and the instruments in the other.  I do know
that the early Beatles records on Capitol definitely were split up the way
that you want - sadly I got rid of my copies of those, along with my
turntable, a couple of years ago. This was usually fixed when they were
remastered for CD, so I would suggest going to some old LP shops, or maybe
checking eBay or craiglist.

Brian