Music creation help

April 4, 2008 3:49 PM

Recommendations for inexpensive software/hardware for making those instrumental/karaoke versions of songs.

I'd like to make music, similar to those cheesy karaoke "tribute" albums, which are pretty much instrumental knockoffs. I'm not really looking to compose and I'm not really concerned about instrument/sound quality.

Any recommended software/hardware? This is for fun, so hopefully nothing with a huge learning curve or a high price (<$400).

I have both Mac and PC.

I've played with Garageband, but it seems more for recording. However if anyone recommends it, I will play around with it more.

posted by mphuie to media & arts (4 comments total)

I've tried this method before, with mixed success.

It's free, so maybe it's worth a try?
posted by peacecorn at 5:47 PM on April 4, 2008

Making instrumentals is difficult. Most people in the remixing realm either create their own instrumentals by looping sections of songs or find instrumentals released by the artists.

That said, I use a few VSTs for this purpose with varying degrees of workability.

Here's a sample with a few minutes' worth of fiddling with settings.

First off is a few bars of the actual track for comparison purposes. Used on the next part is VoiceTrap by Clone Ensemble. It's $25 and pretty good for both isolating vocals and instrumental, but it has a bunch of options and not much documentation and leaves some computer warbling in the background.

After that until the track fades out is Extra Boy Pro by Elevayta. It's $30, five bucks more that VoiceTrap, but that $5 makes a lot of difference. It's got much better quality without the warbling, for one. It's also much easier to figure out. In addition, it has a mode to pick what you want to extract from the track from its panned position.

If those sound like too much, there's a cheaper and less robust version of the second plugin here -- just a $0.90 bandwidth fee. I don't know the quality of that, though.
posted by flatluigi at 7:48 PM on April 4, 2008

Also. VSTs aren't supported in Garageband out of the box, unfortunately. There's this solution, but it requires shelling out $80. I use Ableton Live and recommend it, but I was given it as a gift so I didn't have to pay the $500 myself. I've heard good things about Sony ACID, though, which is $300.

There's probably a cheaper audio program alternative, but I don't know what it'd be.
posted by flatluigi at 7:54 PM on April 4, 2008

Reaper, a ProTools "killer" from the developer of WinAmp and Gnutella, supports VST plugins, and you can use it for free. Available on PC and Mac (Mac development is a bit behind the PC version).
posted by hifimofo at 2:05 AM on April 5, 2008