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Sounds like a magic trick doesn't it? Well...at least to those of us who know a little about how mixing our audio works. Whenever I'm asked "Is it possible to remove the vocal from this music track?", I usually respond, "No." It's like trying to take the sugar out of a cake after you've already mixed it all together and baked it.
Many beginners and music hobbyists are interested in creating a "karaoke" track of sorts from their favorite song so that they can sing or play along to. I've even had clients ask me to remove a vocal from a song so that they could have a backing track for a commercial. And again, I tell them that it's not possible...however, I add that I'll "give it a shot" for them. Not only does this give me an out if I'm unable to do it (I can just remind them I didn't think I could do it), but if somehow I AM able to reduce/remove the vocal they'll be thrilled I was able to do the "impossible" for them. Keeping your clients is all about making them realize you're the best of the best. And if they think I'm the only engineer who will go to great lengths for them, who am I to argue! ;)
There are many plugins on the net and hardware products available that claim to be able to remove a vocal from a stereo mix. Every single one I've tried (which is NOT all of them, I admit) has not been the magic wand it promised to be. Most of them do a decent job of reducing the vocals but a lot of times they just add more artifacts than they should. And most of (if not all) the "tricks" they use, YOU could do yourself with just some simple plugins.
A great article I recommend reading, titled "The Truth of Vocal Eliminators," can be found here. Ethan (Mr. Winer), talks about how vocal eliminators work and the basics of what you can do to achieve this process yourself. He even gives some decent examples of what he's been able to accomplish.
But the article you are reading right now is written by me...so I'm going to share what I've been able to do!
First off, I will say to NEVER EXPECT MIRACLES. The process I'm about to explain is a way to REDUCE the vocal...not always completely eliminate it. It's based on simple physics and properties of acoustics and in many, many cases it will be impossible to remove the vocal entirely. Not only that, but you will most likely affect other instruments around the vocal...which I will explain why soon. However, a lot of times reducing the vocal is good enough for what you want to do.
The idea behind removing the vocals is remembering that a lead vocal is "usually" mixed in the middle of the stereo spectrum. This gets us thinking in "3D" (LCR...kind of). So what if it were possible to just remove the middle of the stereo spectrum? How would we go about doing that? It has to do with one of my favorite topics of discussion...properties of phase. The theory is that since the vocal is in the middle, this means it is coming out of both speakers, simultaneously at the same volume. And if you have two signals at exactly the same volume...how do you get rid of them? You flip the phase of one of the channels! Then they cancel eachother out. Since a guitar solo, or cymbal hit is usually panned of to the left or right, these sounds are rarely affected. However, it also cancels EVERYTHING in the middle out as well. This means kick, snare...anything you might pan in the middle. But you'll just have to live with that (and maybe you can add it in later with samples).
So learning that process a long time ago, I got a call one day from a client. He was planning on doing a TV commercial with me for a local dinner theater. His plan was to shoot video of a couple actors in a musical they were doing, and to dub over their actual voices singing with music. So he wanted to remove the vocal track just for this (of course we didn't have the legal right to do this...but that's for another article). I had done something similar before for him so he understood and he knew that it's not always perfect. He just wanted it close enough to sound good on TV.
I pulled it into Pro Tools and noticed it was an older song (from a 60's musical). The great thing about these is they are usually always panned straight down the middle and the engineer may use very little reverb on the vox track. The reason I mention the reverb is that usually reverb is applied in stereo...and both channels are different. So any trick you use to remove the vocal track WILL leave a reverb trail behind. A lot of times it's just very very faint, so it may not bother you.
Removing Vocals
by Bennychico
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