Phase Cancellation & Noise Reduction – My DIY Method(s)

Hey,

Basically I think a lot of people seem to have a bit of a misconception about phase cancellation. Whilst it’s not possible to perfectly cancel out instrumental parts in a vocal mix if you don’t have exactly the same mix of the instrumental itself using phase cancellation, it’s still possible to achieve some cancellation.

So basically here’s what I do:

– Find an instrumental section of a vocal mix where everything is the same apart from there not being any vocals over the top.
– Invert the phase of it.
– Copy it and mix paste it into a part where the vocal line is as well as the same instrumental section.
– Use Noise Reductiion to clean up what’s left

This dodgy phase cancellation will usually cancel out the low-mid frequencies (to an extent), leaving the mid-high. The success rate of this is very dependant on how similar the instrumental sections are (i.e. the 1 with the vocal and the 1 without that u inverted the phase of).

I then use the Noise Reduction feature in CoolEdit to clean up the mid-high frequencies, the tutorial of which you can find at:

http://www.acapellas4u.co.uk/topic27883.html

However, you do not need to be extracting the centre mono to achieve a satisfactory result after using the above phase cancellation method. You can get a perfectly good result with Noise Reduction whilst retaining the full stereo spectrum on the vocal (something which is a rarity in DIY acapella production?).

Feedback on this method is appreciated. It worked very well for a song I just did where I had the full instrumental, but the mix of the instrumental wasn’t the exact same as the mix with the vocal line (a very annoying problem).