Do it yourself acapellas or DIY refers to the procedure of manually separating a vocal-only portion of a music track from its instrumental counterpart; also known as vocal extraction. Lots of techniques, advice and help in here for creating that very special D.I.Y acapella. (NO REQUESTS)
i'm not getting any good results... I see ots of different program suggestions and methods, but so far, I've been turning out some crap... but, I'm also trying to do rock music vocals... i saw a little in this thread... referrences and what not... but does anyone know if it would make much difference... for shits and grins I tried to do fresh prince and jazzy jeff - parents just don't understand... but I guess I'm not doing something right... i'm new to this, so I'm just i'm just misunderstanding something... any suggestions?
I found that since the beat in a hip hop song is normally looped, if you can find one loop on a track with atleast a minimal amount of vocal (either in the beginning while the artist is cueing up or at the end as the song fades out). Just clip the loop from the song, and invert it (you can do all this in Sound Forge). Then you can place the song and the inverted loop in a loop based program like Acid. Worked well when I couldn't find the instrumental or acapella version of a song
TiMG wrote:heres an overview of the different methods used for extracting vocals...
1. THE PHASE CANCELLATION METHOD Get an instrumental of a song, invert the phase (sometimes refered to as flipping), and mix it with the original.. If done right everything besides the vocal is cancelled out. You can do this in any sequencer like cubase or acid.. The instrumental must be excatly the same time/pitch however. and mp3s might not work if they are badly encoded. Zoom right in to see the 2 waveforms next to each other (look for kick drum hits) and line them up.
2. THE KNOCKOUT METHOD using 'knock0ut' (http://www.freewebs.com/st3pan0va/) you can spectrally subtract one piece of audio from another. Start by extracting the centre mono of a track (soundforge or cooledit will do it with the pan/expand feature). then try and make an instrumental out of loops from the track and 'knock them out' of the vocal parts. This can work even if the instrumental isn't excatly the same as the song.
3. OTHER METHODS Besides these methods you can try Cool edits (now audition) noise reduction feature, which is very powerful. Analyse a bit of instrumental and get a profile (6000 or 4096FFT is a good size).. reduce than from the whole song. You can also try the soundhack spectral plugins and Voxengo's Transmodder to futher reduce spikey nosies like drums.. (don't ask me how .. its all trial and error).
You will NEVER make a totally perfect acapella with 2 and 3. You can however make something good enough to work in your mix.. USE YOUR EARS! LISTEN and learn and you might get somewhere
