Desperado

The next two heroes of our story are such backing tracks created by cutting of original songs or produced with the help of existing voice removal tools. In the case of cutting, there're no difficulties it this thing. Open any editor (Audacity, Sound Forge, Abobe Audition), select any fragment of an original song without voice and copy it again and again. But problem is that the song's arrangements are very sophisticated sometimes and you'll not be able to find a good piece to copy-paste a bridge, for instance. That is where the work of voice-removal and voice-reduction instruments.

Let's look at what's happening with the sound when we apply voice-removal, why is this so ugly and your ears go numb when you listen to such phonograms.

Voice removal tools make a new copy of an original mix where the vocal is looking like deleted with the help of phase inversion. It’s not a secret that sound producers prefer to place the main vocal in the center of stereo panoramas traditionally (by the way, the most famous violators of this rule were the Beatles). That’s why if to divide stereo track of any song into 2 independent mono tracks, turn over a phase of one of these mono tracks and put it back into the initial stereo track, the level of the main vocal will decrease significantly, it will be practically deleted. Practically, yes. In fact, it’s not so simple. Not only lead singer's signal is destroyed this way! Not only the main vocal but also other instruments are located in the center of stereo pan. These important instruments include bass and kick. While we increasing the level of phase inversion, distortions will appear inevitably and be noticeable by ear. Bass and kick will suffer first (it causes psychoacoustic factors). Strictly speaking, 99 percent of sounding instruments are presented in the center one way or another, and the whole phonogram will suffer. It’s worth considering that a vocal part is not only a dry voice but spatial effects applied to it (such as reverb or delay). This is a lion's share of a good commercial mix. In a modern digital epoch, these effects are simple to use and almost don’t cost anything. Let's take to account that delays and revs occupy all width of the stereo base and fly away all over the stereo panorama. Their sounding merges with all the rest instruments, and the so-called masking effect acts. By turning the phase over, you can damp vocal but couldn’t delete ends left from its proceeding. Even if you decide on making it, you will have to delete all music, leaving just the stereo panorama periphery, its leftmost and rightmost points. That's why phonograms got by the voice-removal method have unpleasant characteristic artifacts and overtones, being easily differentiated while hearing and not disposing of high sound quality. For those, who still want to experiment with vocal deletion, we have a fully automated online tool. You can try in by this link. Download any file in mp3 format and receive a result in the form of the link for downloading!