There seem to be a lot of remixes that consist at their core of putting some clipped pieces of singing over something with a similar beat/chord progression to the original song. Even if not, most remixes/mashups don’t involve the entire song, just the vocals or the accompaniment in various forms. I don’t see many commercial songs with versions I can find that preserve the multitrack info, so I’m left wondering where they get these. Underlying rhythm isn’t too hard, instrumental versions of songs for karaoke and whatnot aren’t too uncommon, what mostly gets me is the vocal-only parts which I don’t see sold too much (and checking the ahem usual channels, I see little of this there either).
Since most of these artists are at best too poor to afford licensing and probably access to the raws the studio has and at worst get their tracks from pirating. Of course there’s middle ground. Like using an indie artist that is too busy to provide raws to everyone that wants them but provides his commercial tracks under Creative Commons, leaving lots of easy, legal-tangle free remixes but little to work with.
Where do people get these? My only WAG is to take a karaoke/instrumental version, phase invert it (shift the waveform 180 degrees), and then use the properties of destructive interference to “free” the vocal part by canceling out the rest, but that seems like it may be hard to do well, especially if your instrumental track has slight recording or timing differences. It also leaves the few (very few) instances left over where they only keep the bass part, drum rhythm, or some other small thing, but I’m willing to put those down to finding a raw file somewhere. Am I close? Am I missing something?
Depends on the music - if the voice track is at a significantly different frequency than the background music it could be isolated easily enough. Usually that’s not the case though, which makes that a pretty difficult if not impossible thing to do.
That’s not true. No musical sound is just one frequency, they produce lots of different frequencies and different instruments overlap widely. You might be able to separate a reggae bass-guitar sound from a cymbal that way, but not much beyond that.
Incidentally, recently people have been extracting tracks from the Rock Band video game and posting them on Youtube and stuff. It’s like a Karaoke game, but for all the instruments, so the bands have to submit the individual master tracks for it to work. People figured out how to get at these tracks. Sometimes they sound pretty funny alone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV28VFrY1PY You can find lots of them by running searches such as ‘vocal track’, ‘bass track’ etc.
I never said it was, and acknowledged that there is usually a lot of overlap. But if you have a very high-pitched vocal track over a mostly low thumping beat, you could probably isolate it.
Actually, there is another way-- it’s based on the idea that the main vocal is often panned dead center and all the other tracks are panned a bit to the left or right. That said, the results are usually pretty unimpressive, at least judging by the few I’ve heard.
I looked into doing mashups for a while and finally gave up for exactly this reason. My conclusion from this experience (what I think; I can’t prove it) is that the finding of the a cappella track is a big part of what mashup artists do. The bigger names seem like they get permission to plunder some studio’s archive. The no-name guys do it without permission, or they know somebody who works at a studio, or they trade favors or what have you. Like DJs just spend tons of time looking for records, these guys spend tons of time looking for a cappella tracks.
Some artists do make them available on their websites; the Beastie Boys, for example. But I don’t think there’s an iTunes store for naked vocal tracks-- you find what you can and work with that.
Edit: Actually thirdname has solved the problem; these are good enough for me.
Some artists will release either an acapella or instrumental version of the song as “B sides” on EPs. Sometimes if it’s an official remix the artist will give them access to the master tracks. Otherwise various methods are used to isolate the vocals with varying degrees of success.
In some cases it’s self-selecting… there would be an original mix of a tune which had some sections with just a vocal (or a vocal and minimal backing track).
Producers would just take that limited clean sample and base their tune around it, and have to make so without the other vocals.
So when you say “most remixes/mashups don’t involve the entire song, just the vocals or the accompaniment in various forms” it’s often (or has been in the past) precisely because the remixer could only sample a limited “clean” section of the vocal from the main release.
That’s in addition to the other ways mentioned of getting hold of raw vocal tracks from the studio.
In some cases it might be that the original vocal has simply been resung by another vocalist in the style of the original.
If you have sophisticated-enough software, it’s really not that hard to do. I’ve removed vocals using Adobe Audition, and it’s not the most perfect result, but it worked for what I wanted.