How can I turn songs with vocals into instrumental tracks?
February 8, 2020 12:45 AM Subscribe
How do you remove the vocals from a track to create an instrumental version of the song? Difficulty level: No special equipment or expensive software.
I'm deep into wedding planning and thinking about song choices for the ceremony and first dance. There are a couple of songs that would be perfect if I could get a hold of instrumental versions. Assuming I've searched far and wide and can't find decent instrumental versions available for download, is it possible to remove the vocals without any special equipment or expensive software?
I do have a crappy laptop running Windows, and my fiance has a Macbook. The resulting instrumental tracks would need to be saved in a format that your average wedding DJ could play.
I'm deep into wedding planning and thinking about song choices for the ceremony and first dance. There are a couple of songs that would be perfect if I could get a hold of instrumental versions. Assuming I've searched far and wide and can't find decent instrumental versions available for download, is it possible to remove the vocals without any special equipment or expensive software?
I do have a crappy laptop running Windows, and my fiance has a Macbook. The resulting instrumental tracks would need to be saved in a format that your average wedding DJ could play.
Best answer: The kids these days have literally never heard of an "instrumental" track. Have you tried looking for the "karaoke" version?
posted by sexyrobot at 1:13 AM on February 8, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by sexyrobot at 1:13 AM on February 8, 2020 [6 favorites]
I guarantee that 90% of what you are looking for will be on Youtube if you just search for "song name karaoke". Possibly 100%. It's amazing actually.
Doing it yourself isn't really going to work, or at least you'll find that you can't completely subtract out the voices without also killing a lot of the music behind them. The human voice and musical instruments that carry melody (guitar, piano, saxophone, etc.) occupying the same midrange of sound frequencies, and you can't just "notch" them out of a recording that you'll have access to. Music is distributed to the masses as two-track media (stereo=left+right). What's recorded in the studio though is "multi-track" (16 tracks, 32, etc.) with each microphone going to a separate track. So the record company (or artist) which owns the multitrack recording could create an instrumental release, but you can't.
posted by intermod at 6:07 AM on February 8, 2020 [1 favorite]
Doing it yourself isn't really going to work, or at least you'll find that you can't completely subtract out the voices without also killing a lot of the music behind them. The human voice and musical instruments that carry melody (guitar, piano, saxophone, etc.) occupying the same midrange of sound frequencies, and you can't just "notch" them out of a recording that you'll have access to. Music is distributed to the masses as two-track media (stereo=left+right). What's recorded in the studio though is "multi-track" (16 tracks, 32, etc.) with each microphone going to a separate track. So the record company (or artist) which owns the multitrack recording could create an instrumental release, but you can't.
posted by intermod at 6:07 AM on February 8, 2020 [1 favorite]
Spleeter as mentioned above uses a neural net trained on a whole lot of multitrack recordings, it isn’t perfect but it is pretty amazing. Definitely don’t waste your time with any other DIY approaches though, I agree.
posted by STFUDonnie at 6:12 AM on February 8, 2020
posted by STFUDonnie at 6:12 AM on February 8, 2020
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Spleeter is as good as it currently gets AFAIK, and is free to boot.
Enkidude in the MeFi thread about its release did a newbie walkthrough on how to set this up.
posted by CrystalDave at 12:54 AM on February 8, 2020 [7 favorites]