I know it is probably close to impossible to totally remove a vocal
from a song. But is there a way to lower the volume of a vocal on a
song. I really like the background drums of this one song. But the
vocals are annoying. Any tips on how to do this in audacity?

By the way, I think Audacity is a wonderful tool. But they don't
explain the functions well in their Faq. Are there any websites that
can take a newbie like myself through the functions of Audacity? And be
clear and precise about it?

wrote:
I know it is probably close to impossible to totally remove a vocal
from a song. But is there a way to lower the volume of a vocal on a
song. I really like the background drums of this one song. But the
vocals are annoying. Any tips on how to do this in audacity?

Invert one channel, then sum the two channels to mono. Depending on
how the song is mixed, it will work or not.

By the way, I think Audacity is a wonderful tool. But they don't
explain the functions well in their Faq. Are there any websites that
can take a newbie like myself through the functions of Audacity? And be
clear and precise about it?

I don't know offhand. There is probably some general "how to use a DAW"
book out there which could be useful if your problem is that you don't
know what the various functions are actually for (ie. it's an issue of
lack of audio background rather than background with the application).
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

wrote:
I know it is probably close to impossible to totally remove a vocal
from a song. But is there a way to lower the volume of a vocal on a
song. I really like the background drums of this one song. But the
vocals are annoying. Any tips on how to do this in audacity?

By the way, I think Audacity is a wonderful tool. But they don't
explain the functions well in their Faq. Are there any websites that
can take a newbie like myself through the functions of Audacity? And
be clear and precise about it?

Audacity is a bit of a toy, but excellent at the price. It doesn't have a
voval remover tool.

Unfortunately it doesn't even allow use of industry-standard plugins. If it
did DX you could use the Analogx free VocalRemover.

I use the above plug in multirtrack app by copying the track, putting
Vremover on one copy, and a shelving HPF around 100Hz on the other (tweak it
per voice) to mitigate some of the inevitably lost bass if just the remover
used soley.

geoff

Because of the constant improvements being made to Audacity, most
documentation is out of date, though I think some of the guys are
working on that (check out
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page for example).

As with any community project, the best place to ask about stuff is
probably the audacity-users mailing list or the forums
(http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/l...audacity-users and
http://audacityteam.org/forum/ respectivly)

is there a way to lower the volume of a vocal

Besides combining the left and right channels with one channel reversed, as
was explained, you also need to shelf-cut the low end on one channel. That
way you avoid eliminating all the bass along with the vocal.

See this article for a more detailed explanation:

www.ethanwiner.com/novocals.html

--Ethan

On 14 Apr 2006 16:10:14 -0700, wrote:

I know it is probably close to impossible to totally remove a vocal
from a song. But is there a way to lower the volume of a vocal on a
song. I really like the background drums of this one song. But the
vocals are annoying. Any tips on how to do this in audacity?

By the way, I think Audacity is a wonderful tool. But they don't
explain the functions well in their Faq. Are there any websites that
can take a newbie like myself through the functions of Audacity? And be
clear and precise about it?

There's a tool in Audition that makes a better attempt at this job
than anything else I've come across. It does more than knock out the
centre channel by simple phase reversal. But Audition costs money!