Can anyone recommend a vocal remover that works? I tried the plugin that comes with PT and a couple of others - both free and purchased. None worked. They all just gave lots of reverb to the vocals. Thanks!
Almost any Vocal Remover too assumes the vocals are centered in the mix. This is just how they work .. so they try to find the sound and cancel it (many times by reverse polation as mentioned).
However sometimes the reverb is not centered, and this may be what you notice. If the L/R reverb is a separate signal, the Vocal Remover may ignore it.
It's one of the main problems with true vocal removal .. I do not know of a reliable solution other than trying other techniques on the result, which often deadens the mix.
It's an art not a science; many times it's not easy, if even possible.
I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome Make your sound your own!
In modern recordings it has become the default to place a lot of effects on the lead vocals. Almost always, these effects are stereo to spread the vocal wider and expand out from center. Vocal removers do not encompass these frequencies. Vocals are also double tracked or a single track copied several times to raise the overall volume of the track without raising the gain or volume. Additional effects separate from the lead vocal track such as delay, expander, chorus that again, widens the vocal from the centered frequencies and these additional vocal copies may also have some panning. If you have three tracks of the lead vocal to add depth to the vocal, two of the vocal tracks are normally panned a little off center and the volume dropped -6/-12 db. The vocal remover will not have much effect in removing the panned vocals.
Vocal removers also have a major adverse effect on all centered instruments which will normally be drums and bass.
The most effective workaround to overcome these deficiencies I've found is to:
A: Make a duplicate track of the intact, unaltered original audio and place a low pass filter across the track with a cutoff that kills most of the vocal audio and only passing the lower drum frequencies and most of the bass. This may be as low as 125Khz and will sound horrible solo'd but you will mix it with the other track you've applied the vocal remover to and it will add back in much of the lower frequencies lost from the vocal removal application.
B: Run the audio track through the ACW and create a chord chart and tempo map so that you can --
C: Add some instruments to the mix from Biab Realtracks to mask the remaining vocals not phased away by the vocal remover and to fill in the center frequencies with musical audio.
In most cases, this results in a track that one can perform over.
Most dedicated vocal removers will work by cancelling out anything in the center of the mix so don't work with newer songs, but there are a few companies making audio isolation software that uses pattern recognition and (I'm assuming) some form of AI to separate sounds instead.
Prosoniq Isolate and Roland R-Mix could both do this, but neither one appears to be currently available unfortunately.
Yes, thanks for that tool Kent. It is a good find.
I do hear some abrupt decay patterns in the extracted audio on the Demos page of the link. (Aretha) I assume this means the remainder of the signal was left in the mix. That's always been my problem with vocal removal .. It's not perfect .. yet, so often requires adjusting.
Here's another step to help the facade; replacing the vocals with something that helps camouflage the result. This can be done using various tools, like match the reverb tail on the replacement track to the existing recording remnants (frequency-wise and time-wise), so they hide the artifacts .. stuff like that. The value of the extra effort depends on the need of course.
I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome Make your sound your own!
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