Music Software Question....

[Nightmare Doom]

I wonder if anyone knows there exists a music software or device that allows you to remove the lyrics from a song leaving only the music behind?

[40oz]

I assume you mean from songs by your favorite bands. When bands make music, their music is recorded all together, as in the band members play their music, and the singers sing in the same session. So it would be impossible to remove the lyrics to a song without severely damaging the performance of the other instruments in the song.

[Remilia Scarlet]

I think GoldWave had a function to remove them, but it tore the sound up.

The problem is that the human voice shares frequencies with the music it's recorded on. Unless you had access to the original multitrack recordings, you're options are: forget about it or chew up the sound trying.

[Lüt]

If you can get the original multi-track recording of the songs, then I could point you to some multi-track editors in which you could mute the vocal track, otherwise once they're in the final mix then they're in the final mix and that's that.

[Technician]

JohnnyRancid said:

I assume you mean from songs by your favorite bands. When bands make music, their music is recorded all together, as in the band members play their music, and the singers sing in the same session. So it would be impossible to remove the lyrics to a song without severely damaging the performance of the other instruments in the song.

Multitrack. All audio impute are recorded in separate tracks and mixed on a multi-track reel (the number of tracks per tape very). Sadly music we get today is all mixed on two-track stereo. It's compressed and can't be separated without bastardisation (The gart movement).
However we do have DVD and Super Audio formats which have five channel mixes. I don't know if they can be separated though.

[Kirby]

DJ_Haruko said:

I think GoldWave had a function to remove them, but it tore the sound up.

The problem is that the human voice shares frequencies with the music it's recorded on. Unless you had access to the original multitrack recordings, you're options are: forget about it or chew up the sound trying.

Goldwave does have that function, but from what I recalled it didn't affect the left over music that badly. Lemme see here for a second.....

[esselfortium]

For a mixed stereo song, there are some programs that can use phase-cancellation tricks (invert the phase of the left track, combine it with the right track, and everything in the middle gets cancelled out) and/or equalization (cutting or boosting, in this case cutting, certain frequencies from the audio) to try removing vocals from a song, but their success depends on how the song is mixed and the quality of the source audio you're working with. MP3s and other lossy audio formats, even if they're at a high bitrate and sound perfectly fine when listening normally, will usually reveal lots of warbly glitchiness if you try using a phase-cancellation trick on them. With the original audio in WAV format or something comparable to it, it's possible to get good results, but it very much depends on how the song is mixed: you're likely to end up removing some of the drums as well, and still have some of the vocals' reverb and other effects audible.

[AndrewB]

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[Ed]

Don't get your hopes up, the answer is usually a no. The end results will be unusable. There are some exceptions. Older recordings typically pan instruments, including drums, way off to the far left and right while leaving the center for vocals. Using a stereo image enhancing program, you can isolate the center track even more-so and have a much easier time pin-pointing where the vocals are set.

[Sharessa]

The only real way to remove the lyrics would be to get the original tracks then remove the vocals. Some bands do this a lot for remixing purposes, like Nine Inch Nails and Das Ich, but if you're looking for a specific song at random, you're unlikely to find these. They have to actually be released by the band or label.

[Coopersville]

Sometimes if you fiddle with the equalizer settings, you can drown out the vocals.

[Ed]

There's always karaoke recordings :)

[Maes]

Ed said:

There's always karaoke recordings :)

Yeah, that's probably your best option. There's no automated, 100% guaranteed method for removing just the human voice from a mixed, multi-track recording, unless you have access to at least the voice track separately.

This actually falls into the broader problem of breaking down a mixed, multi-layered recording into its basic tracks (aka MP3 to MIDI), for which there's also no out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all solution.

[OldSnakeWontDie]

Or don't stick your headphone jacks all the way in. Fiddle around with the depth it works for me 90% of the time.

[Kirby]

OldSnakeWontDie said:

Or don't stick your headphone jacks all the way in. Fiddle around with the depth it works for me 90% of the time.

HEH, oldschool methods :D

[Nick Perrin]

OldSnakeWontDie said:

Or don't stick your headphone jacks all the way in. Fiddle around with the depth it works for me 90% of the time.

The strange thing is, this is very true. I remember doing this on portable CD players back when they first started coming out. "Hey guys, listen, I have the instrumental version!"

Obviously it messes with the rest of the sound, and probably puts it into mono too (but I can't recall), but it's still a nifty trick. Vocals always seem to get extremely quieted down that way.

[exp(x)]

Yeah, shorting the left and right outputs can yield interesting results sometimes.

[Sharessa]

An interesting thing to do with old Beatles songs (and other songs from the early stereo era) is to turn off one of the speakers. Since all the instruments were tracked one way while the vocals were tracked the other way, you end up with an instrumental. I forget if it's left or right or even consistent, but it works.

[Maes]

Danarchy said:

An interesting thing to do with old Beatles songs (and other songs from the early stereo era) is to turn off one of the speakers. Since all the instruments were tracked one way while the vocals were tracked the other way, you end up with an instrumental. I forget if it's left or right or even consistent, but it works.

That was mostly a cheap trick to get "stereo" sound from a recording session that really didn't distinguish/position instruments differently. Found that in many early 70s songs too, hardly "early stereo".

[CODOR]

Maes said:
That was mostly a cheap trick to get "stereo" sound from a recording session that really didn't distinguish/position instruments differently. Found that in many early 70s songs too, hardly "early stereo".

I think you're thinking of the various fake stereo methods that involved playing with the balance knob and/or EQ and/or adding echo to mono recordings to make the sound coming out of the two speakers different enough to call it "stereo".

All but maybe a handful of the Beatles' early songs were recorded to two-track tape with the instruments on one and the vocals on the other -- the stereo mixes aren't much more than copies of these tapes, which makes it easy to isolate either the music or the vocals...

[Maes]

*shrug* I can confirm that at least the 50s/60s and some of the 70s vinyls I have are actually recorded that way, at most you can use the "mono" switch on my turntable/amp combo to make the ear-piercing separation go away...

P.S. yeah, I have a collection of 45 rpm singles from my mother's youth, and, as an example, Paul Anka's "Pity Pity" is recorded this way.

[SyntherAugustus]

I remember I flipped audio cords into the wrong plugs and got instrumental versions of Jimmy Hendrix and AC/DC by accident. The sound was a bit distorted but the vocals were gone.

[fraggle]

AndrewB said:

Related questions

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Yes.

[Prince of Darkness]

Maes said:

*shrug* I can confirm that at least the 50s/60s and some of the 70s vinyls I have are actually recorded that way, at most you can use the "mono" switch on my turntable/amp combo to make the ear-piercing separation go away...

P.S. yeah, I have a collection of 45 rpm singles from my mother's youth, and, as an example, Paul Anka's "Pity Pity" is recorded this way.

I have done the same thing with Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and have gotten some amazing effects.

[Maes]

AndrewB said:

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fraggle said:

Yes.

Yeah, that does the trick but I think that when this kind of questions pop up, there is always a hope/expectation that there is an automagical method of doing so with any random image/scene, without using multiple shots/additional photos, or, in other words, being able to "create something from nothing" without using extra information and at the same time being accurate (aka faithful to reality).

This of course would imply being able to perfectly reconstruct any random signal (sound, image, video, text, sprite...) after having stripped it down of arbitrarily extended content, which is of course ]just bullshit.