Attenuating lead vocals

[HopHead]

I have a project to do that requires me to eliminate the lead vocal in a particular piece of music. I have been playing around with the File Conversion Effect as well as the preset with somewhat less than spectacular results.

Is there anyone here that may be able to give me some additional help? Maybe my expectations are too high or I am not understanding correctly but the description of its use seems to be exactly what I am looking for - getting rid of the voice!

Thanks
Tony

[Craig Maier]

Re: Attenuating lead vocals

First, the track must be in stereo to begin with. If so, consider trying the Channel Blender with one channel set to phase invert. (There may be a preset for you to select from there already) Set the Crossover frequency to something around 150 Hz low pass. Use this in conjunction with a graphic eq to minimize the vocal.

[HopHead]

Re: Attenuating lead vocals

Thanks Craig - will try and let u know how i get on

[greg_m]

Re: Attenuating lead vocals

I once came across a CD where the vocal was essentially mono, but I couldn't completely remove it... it seemed as if the high frequencies, especially, remained after a L-R operation.

Upon close visual examination of the original waveform, I discovered that the one channel was shifted one sample, relative to the other! So although the waveform was the same in amplitude, it was displaced in time, and you couldn't subtract all of it... the HF's remained. Sneaky!

Of course I manually shifted things back, so that the vocal was exactly "in sync" on both channels, and then the L-R matrix worked just fine.