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.

BIAB 2026:RB 2026, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.