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How to make a song/mp3 'Acapella' (remove instruments)
winter_combat_knight
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey fellas, ive been looking on youtube at songs which are labelled 'Acapella', which apparently is the term used for songs, with just the lyrics, removin the instrucments. Just wondereing if anyone knows if there is a way to do this yourself with your own mp3s? Maybe software download or something. Im asking because i think it would be really cool to play around with in my spare time.
example of what i mean
*note - this isnt a piracy thread. i buy ALL my music. I'm just asking if there is software to edit my music, not download music. lol
Cheers for any help fellas.
example of what i mean
*note - this isnt a piracy thread. i buy ALL my music. I'm just asking if there is software to edit my music, not download music. lol
Cheers for any help fellas.
winter_combat_knight on
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There's no way to simply take the vocals out and have it sound like an a capella track, though. Those are usually found on singles, where there might be a vocals-only version (or a music-only version), or if it's official they'll be special things right from the label.
As a point of interest, "a cappella" is Italian for "from the chorus/choir" and refers to any piece of music done without instruments, vocals only, whether created that way or modified as we are discussing.
First the obvious/super basic: Sound is quasi-periodic changes in pressure in the air, or longitudinal waves. The frequency of the wave determines the pitch, the amplitude of the wave determines the volume, and the shape of the wave determines the timbre.
When two sound waves interact, they don't just stay two waves, they combine, and the sum of the waves is the result. Even if two waves were to magically reach your ear without interacting, the ear only has one system for interpreting waves, so by the time they get to your brain they're only one wave, with a very complex shape.
In electronic reproduction of music, think of speakers like... plungers. They're pretty much just an ability to increase and decrease pressure. Membrane, way of making it move, and that's the basics. They can produce only one wave. When mixing with the source tracks, you have a separate wave form for each track that you can adjust up or down. If you have the source tracks, if you want, you can cut everything down to the third guitar track, or turn up only bass+vocals, or whatever you want. The only sure-fire way to pull certain instruments out is if you have a mixing program and the source tracks, then you can just cleanly cut out whatever you want.
However, once a song is exported to mp3 or wav or any single file, since the end result and what's coming out of the speakers is only one wave, the song is only stored as one wave.(Technically 1-7, but that's a different story) So basically, all the parts are intertwined together and all you have is the addition. Now, since waves are just the addition of all the component waves, you can subtract a wave from another and the result is nothing. This is how noise canceling headphones work. They produce a negative wave from what's coming in. This is how most programs that try to remove certain tracks work. They a: take away certain areas of the stereo spectrum, and b: try to produce a negative wave of what the instrument tracks would be. The problem is that without the exact source track, you can't really get the negative wave perfect. Again if you had the source tracks you could perfectly subtract them, but you can't do that perfectly without the source tracks.
So short answer - doing it perfectly is very difficult to impossible without source tracks.
Khavall I have a question. I just read your reply and I understand what you are saying. You broke it down very well. That's the explanation I've been looking for for quite some time. Now that I know that, my question is...how, or where would I get the " Source Tracks" --- and what program(s) would i use to create the A Capella.
To give you some knowledge on what I'm working with,
I have a computer & I'm interested in locating a music software which would let me edit tracks & also (very importantly), I would like to completely remove/separate vocals from the music, or vice versa —remove the music & create an a capella. I've been reading online post, youtube, & search results on yahoo on how to extract vocals & so far yours has been the best.
If you don't mind I'd like to ask: How would you do it if you wanted to use the source track and create an instrumental, or an a capella?
Preciate cha